Unveiling Temporal Trends in 19th Century Literature: An Information Retrieval Approach

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06833v1
• Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:00:10 GMT
• Title: Unveiling Temporal Trends in 19th Century Literature: An Information Retrieval Approach
• Authors: Suchana Datta, Dwaipayan Roy, Derek Greene, Gerardine Meaney,
• Abstract summary: In English literature, the 19th century witnessed a significant transition in styles, themes, and genres. This paper explores the evolution of term usage in 19th century English novels through the lens of information retrieval.
• Score: 5.804963603084041
• License:
• Abstract: In English literature, the 19th century witnessed a significant transition in styles, themes, and genres. Consequently, the novels from this period display remarkable diversity. This paper explores these variations by examining the evolution of term usage in 19th century English novels through the lens of information retrieval. By applying a query expansion-based approach to a decade-segmented collection of fiction from the British Library, we examine how related terms vary over time. Our analysis employs multiple standard metrics including Kendall's tau, Jaccard similarity, and Jensen-Shannon divergence to assess overlaps and shifts in expanded query term sets. Our results indicate a significant degree of divergence in the related terms across decades as selected by the query expansion technique, suggesting substantial linguistic and conceptual changes throughout the 19th century novels.

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