Time for Genre:
Temporal Expressions as Features for the Classification of Literary Subgenres
Ulrike Henny-Krahmer
(NFDI4Culture, University of Cologne)
Conference "EADH2021",
September 23, 2021
Slides at: https://hennyu.github.io/eadh_21/
Overview
- Introduction:
Classification of Literary Subgenres with Temporal Expressions - Corpus and Methods:
19th Century Novels, Temporal Tagging, and Classification - Results and Discussion
- Conclusions
Introduction:
Classification of Literary Subgenres with Temporal Expressions
Classification of Literary Subgenres
- Classification of texts by genre: major concern of Computational Linguistics (e.g. Biber 1992) and Computational Literary Studies (Underwood 2015; Hettinger et al. 2016; Schöch 2017)
- Use of different types of features (MFW, topics, sentiments, character networks)
- Overall goal: better understand distinctive features
- Here: temporal expressions as features
Temporal expressions
Sequences of tokens that refer to time (Ferro et al. 2005)
| DATE/TIME | When did something happen? | "on October 5th, 1850", "3 p.m." |
| DURATION | How long did it last? | "for three hours" |
| SET | How often did it occur? | "every Tuesday" |
- Studies about temporal expressions in literary texts: Bögel et al. 2015; Fischer and Strötgen 2015a, 2015b; Gius and Jacke 2015
- ≠ subgenre classification
Subgenres of the novel
- Here: Spanish American 19th century novels
- Types of novels: historical, customs ("novela de costumbres"), sentimental
- Time in the novels:
- temporal perspective: events in the present / past
- precise / vague temporal location
- hypotheses: more precise temporal expressions in historical novels, more fuzzy/unspecified ones in sentimental novels
Questions
- How useful are temporal features in general for the classification of novels by subgenre?
- How relevant are different temporal expressions for different subgenres?
Corpus and Methods:
19th Century Novels, Temporal Tagging, and Classification
Corpus
|
Conha19: https://github.com/cligs/conha19 256 novels:
|
Methods
- Temporal tagging: HeidelTime 2.2.1 (Strötgen and Gertz 2015)
- Linguistic annotation: TreeTagger 3.2.3 (Schmid 1995) and FreeLing 4.0 (Padró and Stanilovsky 2012)
- Classification: linear SVM, C = 100, undersampling, random selection of novels (10 times), 10-fold cross-validation
Features: temporal expressions
- 499 different features
- basic types of temporal expressions (DATE, TIME, DURATION, SET)
- custom subtypes (e.g. fully vs. unspecified DATES: "Mayo de 1854" vs. "hoy")
- 50 most frequent temporal expressions of each basic type (e.g. "hoy", "las 9 de la noche", "dos horas", "cada día")
- counts of different verb tenses (present, imperfect, future, past, conditional)
- relative / proportional values
- see https://github.com/hennyu/time_for_genre_eadh21
Features: MFW
- another feature set of 4,000 MFW
- tf-idf values
- for comparison and combination
- (see Hettinger et al. 2016, Henny-Krahmer forthcoming)
Results and Discussion
Classification results (mean accuracies)
| Subgenres | Temporal features | MFW | Temporal + MFW |
|---|---|---|---|
| historical novel vs. other | 0.70 | 0.83 | 0.85 |
| sentimental novel vs. other | 0.64 | 0.78 | 0.77 |
| novel of customs vs. other | 0.62 | 0.72 | 0.73 |
| historical novel vs. sentimental novel | 0.74 | 0.92 | 0.91 |
| historical novel vs. novel of customs | 0.76 | 0.86 | 0.89 |
| sentimental novel vs. novel of customs | 0.59 | 0.74 | 0.74 |
Most important features (historical vs. customs)
Most important features (hist. vs. sentimental)
Most important features (sent. vs. customs)
Conclusions
Conclusions
- classification of literary subgenres with temporal features alone: above baseline of 50%
- MFW alone: better
- MFW + temporal features: results improve for certain constellations (when the sentimental novel is not involved), but remain the same or get slightly worse for others
Conclusions
- temporal features add relevant information for the distinction of some subgenres, but not for all
- feature weights: a few very specific temporal features are relevant (fully specified dates, times of the day)
- subgenres are not all defined on the same textual and linguistic levels
- next steps: evaluate quality of temporal tagging in more detail, classify other types of novels
Thank you!
Slides at: https://hennyu.github.io/eadh_21/
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