Speaker: Kirill Maslinsky
Affiliation: 1, INALCO, Paris; 2, Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Saint Petersburg
Title: How Exactly does Literary Content Depend on Genre? A Case Study of Animals in Children’s Literature
Abstract: The content of literary fiction at least partly depends on literary tradition. The dependence is attested quantitatively in the association of genre with lexical statistical patterns. This short paper is a step to formal modeling of the content-moderating processes associated with literary genres. The idea is to explain prevalence of the particular lemmas in a literary text by the genre-dependent accessibility of the semantic category during the creative process. Data on animals mentioned in various sub-genres in a corpus of Russian children’s literature is used as an empirical case. Vocabulary growth models are applied to infer genre-related differences in overall diversity of animal vocabularies. A constrained topic model is employed to infer preferences for particular animal lemmas displayed by various genres. Results demonstrate the models’ potential to infer genre-related content preferences in the context of high variance and data imbalance.
