Computational linguistics and the humanist

Benzon, William L.; Hays, David G.

doi:10.1007/bf02420060

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The focus was on syntax, which appeared more tractable than semantics and pragmatics) Recent computational linguistic research in knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language text seems to constitute a significant departure from the generally fuzzy notions of the past, and in the authors' opinion, has considerable potential for the future. As Benzon and Hays (1976) rightly observed, the methods of language analysis practiced by computational linguists differ both in purpose and in techniques from those of the literary theoretician. However, we believe that the tools and approaches developed by the former can be of interest and utility to the latter.…”

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confidence: 93%

Knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language discourse

Silva¹,

Montgomery²

1977

Comput Hum

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IntroductionFor many years, literary scholars, folklorists, anthropologists, and others have been developing a rich pool of analytical techniques for selective critical interpretation of texts. To these have been added, through comparatively recent advances in computer technology, language processing tools such as concordance generators and statistical analysis programs that have freed the humanities scholar from timeconsuming clerical chores, and supported his qualitative judgments with quantitative statements. While such tools allow the humanist to use his time more effectively, they do not, however, in any way augment his intellectual processes. Computer-based approaches to the study of cognition in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence are currently having an important impact on the study of language and the representation of the underlying knowledge which supports the comprehension process. This new area of research offers approaches to the construction of computer programs which would assist the user in the substance of his task, as opposed to programs that allow him to perform clerical activities more effectively. The general trend is to devise computer programs which model human natural-language comprehension and then delegate some of the user's intellectual functions to the machine.One such function might be the deduction of implicit facts and relations from a text and their explicit representation in a data base. To do this, a computer must first be programmed to "understand" language. Twenty years of experience in the field of natural-language processing have shown that an automated language "understanding" system must incorporate many kinds of knowledge. The fundamental problem facing builders of such systems is how to represent in the computer the many kinds of knowledge which a person uses in understanding natural-language text. Although there has been a certain amount of arm-waving on the subject of representing extralinguistic or "encyclopedic" knowledge since the time before computational linguistics had a name, few of the concepts used appeared at all productive, and even fewer were sufficiently explicated to determine how they might be used. The focus was on syntax, which appeared more tractable than semantics and pragmatics) Recent computational linguistic research in knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language text seems to constitute a significant departure from the generally fuzzy notions of the past, and in the authors' opinion, has considerable potential for the future. As Benzon and Hays (1976) rightly observed, the methods of language analysis practiced by computational linguists differ both in purpose and in techniques from those of the literary theoretician. However, we believe that the tools and approaches developed by the former can be of interest and utility to the latter. It is for this reason that we offer this paper, which focuses on recent developments in the representation of linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge for aut...

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confidence: 93%

Knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language discourse

Silva¹,

Montgomery²

1977

Comput Hum

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“…Literary critics form interpretations of meaning in works of literature. Building computational models that can help form and test these interpretations is a fundamental goal of digital humanities research (Benzon and Hays, 1976). Within natural language processing, most previous work that engages with literature relies on "distant reading" (Jockers, 2013), which involves discovering high-level patterns from large collections of stories (Bamman et al, 2014;Chaturvedi et al, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Wang

Iyyer

2019

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North

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Literary critics often attempt to uncover meaning in a single work of literature through careful reading and analysis. Applying natural language processing methods to aid in such literary analyses remains a challenge in digital humanities. While most previous work focuses on "distant reading" by algorithmically discovering high-level patterns from large collections of literary works, here we sharpen the focus of our methods to a single literary theory about Italo Calvino's postmodern novel Invisible Cities, which consists of 55 short descriptions of imaginary cities. Calvino has provided a classification of these cities into eleven thematic groups, but literary scholars disagree as to how trustworthy his categorization is. Due to the unique structure of this novel, we can computationally weigh in on this debate: we leverage pretrained contextualized representations to embed each city's description and use unsupervised methods to cluster these embeddings. Additionally, we compare results of our computational approach to similarity judgments generated by human readers. Our work is a first step towards incorporating natural language processing into literary criticism.

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Three Evolutionary Pieces: Review Essays on the Origins and Evolution of Culture

Benzon¹

2013

SSRN Journal

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Computational linguistics and the humanist

Cited by 9 publications

References 30 publications

Knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language discourse

Knowledge representation for automated understanding of natural language discourse

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Three Evolutionary Pieces: Review Essays on the Origins and Evolution of Culture

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