Anomaly-based large-scale analysis of style and genre reflected in the use of stylistic devices in medieval literature

基于异常的大规模中世纪文学文体手段使用所反映的风格和流派分析

• 批准号: 424207252
• 负责人: Professor Dr.-Ing. Joachim Denzler
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Informatik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/424207252?language=en
• 关键词: Anomaly; based; large; scale; analysis

The goal of this project is the development of a novel distant-reading tool for the quantitative analysis of the use of rhetorical devices. The developed methods will be applied for a comparative stylometric analysis of three medieval genres: the Middle High German adaptations of the trois matières. From the viewpoint of medieval studies, we aim for identifying genre-specific stylistic differences between romances of antiquity, Arthurian romances, and chanson de geste adaptations of the 12th and 13th century. Up to now, quantifiable similarities and differences of these genres regarding their use of rhetorical devices have not been analysed. Such an analysis would be valuable for the controversial discussion about the medieval concepts of ‘genre’ and the genre-awareness of medieval authors as well as for assessing the relevance of rhetorical devices taught in medieval schools for the practice of vernacular authors. To this end, we intend to analyse whether selection, use, and frequency of rhetorical devices depend on the scene type and whether characteristic differences can be attributed to genres or just different authors or dates of origin. Such a broad analysis requires computational methods for distant reading, which do not yet exist for the detection of stylistic devices to a satisfactory degree, not to mention for Middle High German texts. For this purpose, we seek to develop novel methods for detecting rhetorical devices based on methods from the fields of anomaly detection as well as active and life-long machine learning. In this context, we consider rhetorical devices as ‘anomalies’, as deviations from the quantitative norm established by the greater part of the corpus, which can be detected using statistical methods (e.g., a chiasmus is an anomaly amidst non-chiastic constructions). To reduce time-consuming manual annotation tasks to a minimum, we propose to employ active learning techniques in a semi-supervised scenario with the human in the loop: Based on an initially unsupervised process of detecting stylistic anomalies, the system refines itself in an interactive process by actively asking the user for annotations for a few informative examples. Furthermore, we intend to integrate prior theoretical knowledge provided by experts into the anomaly detection procedure for filtering out obvious false positives and steering it towards certain rhetorical devices. In this project, we will focus on two exemplary stylistic devices: the chiasmus as a figure of repetition and the metaphor as a trope. The latter can be seen as an anomaly as well due to the unusual interactions between words from different domains, reflected in their word embeddings. Since such embeddings need to be learned from huge corpora, which are not available for low-resource languages such as Middle High German, we also strive for developing a technique to adapt such embeddings learned on New High German corpora to Middle High German.

本研究的目的是开发一种新型的远程阅读工具，用于定量分析修辞手段的使用。所开发的方法将适用于三个中世纪的风格比较分析：中高地德国改编的三人matières。从中世纪研究的角度来看，我们的目标是确定特定类型的古代传奇，亚瑟王传奇，以及12和13世纪改编的圣歌之间的风格差异。到目前为止，这些体裁在修辞手法使用方面的量化的相似性和差异性还没有得到分析。这样的分析将是有价值的中世纪的“体裁”的概念和中世纪作家的体裁意识的争议性讨论，以及评估的相关性，在中世纪学校教的白话作家的实践中的修辞手段。为此，我们打算分析是否选择，使用和频率的修辞手段取决于场景类型，是否特征差异可以归因于体裁或只是不同的作者或起源日期。如此广泛的分析需要远距离阅读的计算方法，这还不存在的检测文体手段，以令人满意的程度，更不用说中高地德语文本。为此，我们寻求开发新的方法来检测修辞手段的基础上，从异常检测以及主动和终身的机器学习领域的方法。在这种情况下，我们认为修辞手段是“异常”，偏离了由大部分语料库建立的定量规范，可以使用统计方法（例如，交叉是非交叉结构中的异常）。为了将耗时的手动注释任务减少到最低限度，我们建议在半监督场景中采用主动学习技术，其中人类处于循环中：基于最初无监督的检测风格异常的过程，系统通过主动询问用户注释一些信息丰富的示例来在交互过程中完善自己。此外，我们打算将专家提供的先验理论知识整合到异常检测过程中，以过滤出明显的误报并将其转向某些修辞手段。在这个项目中，我们将集中在两个典型的文体手段：交叉作为一个数字的重复和隐喻作为一个比喻。后者也可以被视为一种异常，因为不同领域的单词之间存在不寻常的相互作用，反映在它们的单词嵌入中。由于这种嵌入需要从巨大的语料库中学习，这是不适用于低资源的语言，如中古高地德语，我们也努力开发一种技术，以适应这种嵌入学习新高地德语语料库中古高地德语。