Information theory unravels the subtext in Chekhov

The present paper reports a pilot study to approach the subtext in Chekhov’s short-story "Ward No. 6" by means of information theory. The original text is enriched by glosses by which we intend to make explicit the implicit knowledge conveyed by the original text, i.e., the subtext. We generated several text variants with meaningful enrichments and one fake variant that served as a baseline. We could not observe that semantic surprisal as a feature of words and uniform information density have a subtext effect throughout all text variants. However, it turned out that kurtosis and skewness are suitable classification criteria to distinguish meaningful enrichments from fake enrichments.