Abstract
Text reuse measurement is important for both LIS and literary studies, where it is mainly used to study influence between authors. Although projects such as Tesserae have already adopted computational methods for investigating text reuse in Latin poetry, its potential applications to the rich collections of English poetry have not been realized. This research proposes a modified version of the Tesserae Project’s measure based on the insight embodied in TF–IDF to study English poetry. Using the Irish poet Yeats’ relationship to five English Romantic poets as a test case, three parallel experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the suitability of this method for English poetry. The results show that this new method is effective in measuring text reuse in English poetry, and the TF–IDF based modification is more sensitive to known cases of text reuse than the original method. This method can also be adopted to noncanonical literary works in the future, providing an example of the significance of LIS for digital humanities.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar to the text reuse rate between two poets, the text reuse rate between two poems is defined as the average value of each phrase-pair of these two poems. Here, average text reuse rates of poem-pairs rather than phrase-pairs were compared, because the commentary discussed the influence within the unit of poem, rather than phrase [19].
- 2.
There are 41 (Yeats’s poems that are recognized as being influenced by Blake) × 216 (all Blake’s poems) = 8856 poem-pairs in this experiment.
- 3.
There are 9 Yeats’s poem that are recognized as being influenced by a particular Blake’s poem, so there are 9 poem-pairs in this experiment.
- 4.
Due to the paper’s methodological focus, we did not discuss the indications of the results in terms of the relationship between Yeats and different English Romantic poets in specific. For preliminary discussions on this relationship, please refer to our previous work [20].
- 5.
For example, if there are two poem-pairs, and in poem-pair A, there is only one phrase-pair with a text reuse rate of 10. In poem-pair B, there are four phrase-pairs, each with a text reuse rate of 1. Then the average value of the two poem-pairs is (10 + 1) / 2 = 5.5, and the average value of the six phrase-pairs is (10 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1) / 5 = 3. The average value of the poem-pairs is higher, since the shorter poem with a higher text reuse rate contributes more when calculating the average value of poem-pairs than that of phrase-pairs.
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Shang, W., Underwood, T. (2021). Improving Measures of Text Reuse in English Poetry: A TF–IDF Based Method. In: Toeppe, K., Yan, H., Chu, S.K.W. (eds) Diversity, Divergence, Dialogue. iConference 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12645. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71292-1_36
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