Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?

In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story.Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses.For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model.We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.bsnlp-1.10
Primary Topic
Digital Humanities and Scholarship
Type
article
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article

Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?

Matthias Irmer, J. Nathanael Philipp, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Max Kölbl
Digital Humanities and Scholarship
article

Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?

Matthias Irmer, J. Nathanael Philipp, Olav Mueller-Reichau, Max Kölbl
article en

Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story.Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses.For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model.We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect.

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Digital Humanities and Scholarship
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Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story? — Matthias Irmer, J. Nathanael Philipp, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS