No abstract

The analysis of discourse and the study of what characterizes it in terms of communicative objectives is essential to most tasks of Natural Language Processing. Consequently, research on textual genres as expressions of such objectives presents an opportunity to enhance both automatic techniques and resources. To conduct an investigation of this kind, it is necessary to have a good understanding of what defines and distinguishes each textual genre. This research presents a data-driven approach to discover and analyze patterns in several textual genres with the aim of identifying and quantifying the differences between them, considering how language is employed and meaning expressed in each particular case. To identify and analyze patterns within genres, a set of linguistic features is first defined, extracted and computed by using several Natural Language Processing tools. Specifically, the analysis is performed over a corpora of documents-containing news, tales and reviews-gathered from different sources to ensure an heterogeneous representation. Once the feature dataset has been generated, machine learning techniques are used to ascertain how and to what extent each of the features should be present in a document depending on its genre. The results show that the set of features defined is relevant for characterizing the different genres. Furthermore, the findings allow us to perform a qualitative analysis of such features, so that their usefulness and suitability is corroborated. The results of the research can benefit natural language discourse processing tasks, which are useful both for understanding and generating language.

We present a data-driven approach to discover and extract patterns in textual genres with the aim of identifying whether there is an interesting variation of linguistic features among different narrative genres depending on their respective communicative purposes. We want to achieve this goal by performing a multilevel discourse analysis according to (1) the type of feature studied (shallow, syntactic, semantic, and discourse-related); (2) the texts at a document level; and (3) the textual genres of news, reviews, and children’s tales. To accomplish this, several corpora from the three textual genres were gathered from different sources to ensure a heterogeneous representation, paying attention to the presence and frequency of a series of features extracted with computational tools. This deep analysis aims at obtaining more detailed knowledge of the different linguistic phenomena that directly shape each of the genres included in the study, therefore showing the particularities that make them be considered as individual genres but also comprise them inside the narrative typology. The findings suggest that this type of multilevel linguistic analysis could be of great help for areas of research within natural language processing such as computational narratology, as they allow a better understanding of the fundamental features that define each genre and its communicative purpose. Likewise, this approach could also boost the creation of more consistent automatic story generation tools in areas of language generation.