Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?

J. Nathanael Philipp; Olav Mueller-Reichau; Matthias Irmer; Michael Richter; Max Kölbl

doi:10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10

Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?

J. Nathanael Philipp, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Matthias Irmer, Michael Richter, Max Kölbl

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Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story. Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses. For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model. We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect.

Anthology ID:: 2025.bsnlp-1.10
Volume:: Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)
Month:: July
Year:: 2025
Address:: Vienna, Austria
Editors:: Jakub Piskorski, Pavel Přibáň, Preslav Nakov, Roman Yangarber, Michal Marcinczuk
Venues:: BSNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:: Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:: 84–90
Language:
URL:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.bsnlp-1.10/
DOI:: 10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):: J. Nathanael Philipp, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Matthias Irmer, Michael Richter, and Max Kölbl. 2025. Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025), pages 84–90, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):: Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story? (Philipp et al., BSNLP 2025)
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PDF:: https://aclanthology.org/2025.bsnlp-1.10.pdf

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@inproceedings{philipp-etal-2025-information,
    title = "Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?",
    author = {Philipp, J. Nathanael  and
      Mueller-Reichau, Olav  and
      Irmer, Matthias  and
      Richter, Michael  and
      K{\"o}lbl, Max},
    editor = "Piskorski, Jakub  and
      P{\v{r}}ib{\'a}{\v{n}}, Pavel  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Yangarber, Roman  and
      Marcinczuk, Michal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.bsnlp-1.10/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10",
    pages = "84--90",
    ISBN = "978-1-959429-57-9",
    abstract = "In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story. Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses. For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model. We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect."
}

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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?
%A Philipp, J. Nathanael
%A Mueller-Reichau, Olav
%A Irmer, Matthias
%A Richter, Michael
%A Kölbl, Max
%Y Piskorski, Jakub
%Y Přibáň, Pavel
%Y Nakov, Preslav
%Y Yangarber, Roman
%Y Marcinczuk, Michal
%S Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 978-1-959429-57-9
%F philipp-etal-2025-information
%X In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story. Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses. For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model. We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.bsnlp-1.10/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10
%P 84-90

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Markdown (Informal)

[Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?](https://aclanthology.org/2025.bsnlp-1.10/) (Philipp et al., BSNLP 2025)

Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story? (Philipp et al., BSNLP 2025)

ACL

J. Nathanael Philipp, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Matthias Irmer, Michael Richter, and Max Kölbl. 2025. Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025), pages 84–90, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.