@inproceedings{feldkamp-etal-2023-readability,
title = "Readability and Complexity: Diachronic Evolution of Literary Language Across 9000 Novels",
author = "Feldkamp, Pascale and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Lassen, Ida Marie S. and
Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads and
Nielbo, Kristoffer",
editor = {H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika and
{\"O}hman, Emily and
Pirinen, Flammie and
Alnajjar, Khalid and
Miyagawa, So and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Partanen, Niko and
Rueter, Jack},
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Tokyo, Japan",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.27",
pages = "235--247",
abstract = "Using a large corpus of English language novels from 1880 to 2000, we compare several textual features associated with literary quality, seeking to examine developments in literary language and narrative complexity through time. We show that while we find a correlation between the features, readability metrics are the only ones that exhibit a steady evolution, indicating that novels become easier to read through the 20th century but not simpler. We discuss the possibility of cultural selection as a factor and compare our findings with a subset of canonical works.",
}
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Readability and Complexity: Diachronic Evolution of Literary Language Across 9000 Novels
%A Feldkamp, Pascale
%A Bizzoni, Yuri
%A Lassen, Ida Marie S.
%A Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads
%A Nielbo, Kristoffer
%Y Hämäläinen, Mika
%Y Öhman, Emily
%Y Pirinen, Flammie
%Y Alnajjar, Khalid
%Y Miyagawa, So
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Partanen, Niko
%Y Rueter, Jack
%S Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Tokyo, Japan
%F feldkamp-etal-2023-readability
%X Using a large corpus of English language novels from 1880 to 2000, we compare several textual features associated with literary quality, seeking to examine developments in literary language and narrative complexity through time. We show that while we find a correlation between the features, readability metrics are the only ones that exhibit a steady evolution, indicating that novels become easier to read through the 20th century but not simpler. We discuss the possibility of cultural selection as a factor and compare our findings with a subset of canonical works.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.27
%P 235-247
Markdown (Informal)
[Readability and Complexity: Diachronic Evolution of Literary Language Across 9000 Novels](https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.27) (Feldkamp et al., NLP4DH-IWCLUL 2023)
ACL
- Pascale Feldkamp, Yuri Bizzoni, Ida Marie S. Lassen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Kristoffer Nielbo. 2023. Readability and Complexity: Diachronic Evolution of Literary Language Across 9000 Novels. In Proceedings of the Joint 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities and 8th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, pages 235–247, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.