Euphemisms are a linguistic device used to soften discussions of sensitive or uncomfortable topics, with death being a prominent example. In this paper, we present a study on the detection of death-related euphemisms in historical literary texts from a corpus containing Danish and Norwegian novels from the late 19th century. We introduce an annotated dataset of euphemistic and literal references to death, including both common and rare euphemisms, ranging from well-established terms to more culturally nuanced expressions. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art pre-trained language models fine-tuned for euphemism detection. Our findings show that fixed, literal expressions of death became less frequent over time, while metaphorical euphemisms grew in prevalence. Additionally, euphemistic language was more common in historical novels, whereas contemporary novels tended to refer to death more literally, reflecting the rise of secularism. These results shed light on the shifting discourse on death during a period when the concept of death as final became prominent.

We present a framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts, demonstrated through its application to Danish and Norwegian literature from the late 19-th century. Noise, understood as “aberrant sonic behaviour,” is not only an auditory phenomenon but also a cultural construct tied to the processes of civilization and urbanization.We begin by utilizing topic modeling techniques to identify noise-related documents, followed by fine-tuning BERT-based language models trained on Danish and Norwegian texts to analyze a corpus of over 800 novels.We identify and track the prevalence of noise in these texts, offering insights into the literary perceptions of noise during the Scandinavian “Modern Breakthrough” period (1870-1899). Our contributions include the development of a comprehensive dataset annotated for noise-related segments and their categorization into human-made, non-human-made, and musical noises. This study illustrates the framework’s potential for enhancing the understanding of the relationship between noise and its literary representations, providing a deeper appreciation of the auditory elements in literary works, including as sources for cultural history.

We develop and evaluate the first pre-trained language models specifically tailored for historical Danish and Norwegian texts. Three models are trained on a corpus of 19th-century Danish and Norwegian literature: two directly on the corpus with no prior pre-training, and one with continued pre-training. To evaluate the models, we utilize an existing sentiment classification dataset, and additionally introduce a new annotated word sense disambiguation dataset focusing on the concept of fate. Our assessment reveals that the model employing continued pre-training outperforms the others in two downstream NLP tasks on historical texts. Specifically, we observe substantial improvement in sentiment classification and word sense disambiguation compared to models trained on contemporary texts. These results highlight the effectiveness of continued pre-training for enhancing performance across various NLP tasks in historical text analysis.

Sentiment classification is valuable for literary analysis, as sentiment is crucial in literary narratives. It can, for example, be used to investigate a hypothesis in the literary analysis of 19th-century Scandinavian novels that the writing of female authors in this period was characterized by negative sentiment, as this paper shows. In order to enable a data-driven analysis of this hypothesis, we create a manually annotated dataset of sentence-level sentiment annotations for novels from this period and use it to train and evaluate various sentiment classification methods. We find that pre-trained multilingual language models outperform models trained on modern Danish, as well as classifiers based on lexical resources. Finally, in classifier-assisted corpus analysis, we confirm the literary hypothesis regarding the author’s gender and further shed light on the temporal development of the trend. Our dataset and trained models will be useful for future analysis of historical Danish and Norwegian literary texts.