Description of internship:

Huygens ING has a vacancy for an internship in the research project ‘The Riddle of Literary Quality’. This project explores the assumption whether formal characteristics in contemporary Dutch novels may be of importance in calling a novel literary or non-literary, and good or bad. In order to discriminate between the fictional texts that have been included in the corpus, the opinion of readers is being asked in an online survey, Het Nationale Lezersonderzoek (http://www.hetnationalelezersonderzoek.nl). An associated research project at Huygens ING is into online reception of literature. This project investigates among other things what online reception can teach us about literary appreciation.

The intern will perform reception analysis of a small selection of the ‘Riddle’-corpus, which will complement the online survey. To this end, the intern will perform research on online forums, combined with book club interviews. He/she will be working with the team members, especially with two PhD Candidates who are engaged in the survey and the activities on social media concerning the PR. The intern may therefore be involved in these activities as well.

Requirements:

– Master student in Literary Studies or a closely related field
– Dutch native proficiency
– Affinity with empirical research

The duration of the internship will be about 3-5 months, on a part-time basis, depending on the requirements of your master programme.

Those who are interested can send an e-mail to riddle@huygens.knaw.nl

Andreas van Cranenburgh represented The Riddle at The North-American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL, June 3–8 2012, Montreal). He writes:
In the main conference, the first paper that caught my eye was one about a
task called “multiple narrative disentanglement.” This is simply the problem
of recognizing in running text the different narratives with their own sets of
characters and storyline. A method is introduced which is applied to the
famously complex novel ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster-Wallace.
Continue reading →

Last week, Andreas van Cranenburgh attended the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL is one of the foremost conferences in the field of computational linguistics; this year’s acceptance rate was well below 30%. There were only 5 other works about parsing, and all of these were about dependency parsing instead of constituency parsing (different representations for expressing the syntactic structure of sentences). This meant that Andreas’s poster on discontinuous parsing was the only one to focus on constituency structures, which are commonly used in Data-Oriented Parsing and thus relevant to our project.

One paper in particular stood out due to its relevance to our project: Character-based kernels for novelistic plot structure. The paper presented a method to analyze and compare plot structure of novels. For example the relations of characters in a social network can be extracted, as well as their `emotional development’ based on a list of emotion-related words. The resulting information is used to produce a similarity metric for texts. One graph, for example, plotted the emotions of the protagonist of a Jane Austen novel, showing strong peaks corresponding to a proposal, elopement, and marriage of the protagonist. It is encouraging to see that even with a relatively superficial linguistic analysis, interesting details can be revealed of literary texts.

Riddle PhD-student Andreas van Cranenburgh will present a poster at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). The conference will be held at the University of Avignon from April 23 to April 27, 2012. The title of the paper is ‘Efficient parsing with linear context-free rewriting systems.’ It presents results on parsing with discontinuous constituents from his Master thesis, defended in October 2011. More about the conference can be found through http://www.eacl.org/ A pre-print of the paper is available at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~acranenb/eacl2012.pdf