scholarly journals Larger than Life? A Stylometric Analysis of the Multi-Authored 'Vita' of Hildegard of Bingen

Author(s):  
Jeroen De Gussem

This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computional methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed.

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 325
Author(s):  
Zhihao Wu ◽  
Baopeng Zhang ◽  
Tianchen Zhou ◽  
Yan Li ◽  
Jianping Fan

In this paper, we developed a practical approach for automatic detection of discrimination actions from social images. Firstly, an image set is established, in which various discrimination actions and relations are manually labeled. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to create a dataset for discrimination action recognition and relationship identification. Secondly, a practical approach is developed to achieve automatic detection and identification of discrimination actions and relationships from social images. Thirdly, the task of relationship identification is seamlessly integrated with the task of discrimination action recognition into one single network called the Co-operative Visual Translation Embedding++ network (CVTransE++). We also compared our proposed method with numerous state-of-the-art methods, and our experimental results demonstrated that our proposed methods can significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clément Dalloux ◽  
Vincent Claveau ◽  
Natalia Grabar ◽  
Lucas Emanuel Silva Oliveira ◽  
Claudia Maria Cabral Moro ◽  
...  

Abstract Automatic detection of negated content is often a prerequisite in information extraction systems in various domains. In the biomedical domain especially, this task is important because negation plays an important role. In this work, two main contributions are proposed. First, we work with languages which have been poorly addressed up to now: Brazilian Portuguese and French. Thus, we developed new corpora for these two languages which have been manually annotated for marking up the negation cues and their scope. Second, we propose automatic methods based on supervised machine learning approaches for the automatic detection of negation marks and of their scopes. The methods show to be robust in both languages (Brazilian Portuguese and French) and in cross-domain (general and biomedical languages) contexts. The approach is also validated on English data from the state of the art: it yields very good results and outperforms other existing approaches. Besides, the application is accessible and usable online. We assume that, through these issues (new annotated corpora, application accessible online, and cross-domain robustness), the reproducibility of the results and the robustness of the NLP applications will be augmented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-56
Author(s):  
Agathe Balayn ◽  
Jie Yang ◽  
Zoltan Szlavik ◽  
Alessandro Bozzon

The automatic detection of conflictual languages (harmful, aggressive, abusive, and offensive languages) is essential to provide a healthy conversation environment on the Web. To design and develop detection systems that are capable of achieving satisfactory performance, a thorough understanding of the nature and properties of the targeted type of conflictual language is of great importance. The scientific communities investigating human psychology and social behavior have studied these languages in details, but their insights have only partially reached the computer science community. In this survey, we aim both at systematically characterizing the conceptual properties of online conflictual languages, and at investigating the extent to which they are reflected in state-of-the-art automatic detection systems. Through an analysis of psychology literature, we provide a reconciled taxonomy that denotes the ensemble of conflictual languages typically studied in computer science. We then characterize the conceptual mismatches that can be observed in the main semantic and contextual properties of these languages and their treatment in computer science works; and systematically uncover resulting technical biases in the design of machine learning classification models and the dataset created for their training. Finally, we discuss diverse research opportunities for the computer science community and reflect on broader technical and structural issues.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jura Fearnley

<p>This thesis has two components: creative and critical. The creative component is the novel Boden Black. It is a first person narrative, imagined as a memoir, and traces the life of its protagonist, Boden Black, from his childhood in the late 1930s to adulthood in the present day. The plot describes various significant encounters in the narrator’s life: from his introduction to the Mackenzie Basin and the Mount Cook region in the South Island of New Zealand, through to meetings with mountaineers and ‘lost’ family members. Throughout his journey from child to butcher to poet, Boden searches for ways to describe his response to the natural landscape. The critical study is titled With Axe and Pen in the New Zealand Alps. It examines the published writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers climbing at Aoraki/Mount Cook between 1882 and 1920. I advance the theory that there are stylistic differences between the writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers and that the beginning of a distinct New Zealand mountaineering voice can be traced back to the first accounts written by New Zealand mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of Aoraki/Mount Cook. The first mountaineer to attempt to climb Aoraki/Mount Cook was William Spotswood Green, an Irishman who introduced high alpine climbing to New Zealand in 1882. Early New Zealand mountaineers initially emulated the conventions of British mountaineering literature as exemplified by Green and other famous British mountaineers. These pioneering New Zealand mountaineers attempted to impose the language of the ‘civilised’ European alpine-world on to the ‘uncivilised’ world of the Southern Alps. However, as New Zealand mountaineering became more established at Aoraki/Mount Cook from the 1890s through to 1920, a distinct New Zealand voice developed in mountaineering literature: one that is marked by a sense of connection to place expressed through site-specific, factual observation and an unadorned, sometimes laconic, vernacular writing style.</p>


Author(s):  
Emily Ruth Rutter

Framed by Jacques Derrida’s reading of the archive as a vehicle for social control, this chapter and the following one consider the epistemological pressure that contemporary authors put on baseball history and mythology. Chapter 5 thus examines Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues (1996) and Kevin King’s All the Stars Came Out That Night (2005), novels that narrativize interracial play before Jackie Robinson’s 1947 start for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Casting doubt on the reliability of their white first-person narrators, both of whom are reporters, Winegardner and King imply the mediated nature of all historical knowledge. Moreover, The Veracruz Blues and All the Stars Came Out That Night represent a more socially progressive wave of black baseball fiction, devoid of heroic white male protagonists and/or teleological tales about the transition from segregation to integration—strategies that compromise the cultural work of the white-authored novels published during the 1970s (chapters 1 and 2).


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Overdorf ◽  
Rachel Greenstadt

AbstractStylometry is a form of authorship attribution that relies on the linguistic information to attribute documents of unknown authorship based on the writing styles of a suspect set of authors. This paper focuses on the cross-domain subproblem where the known and suspect documents differ in the setting in which they were created. Three distinct domains, Twitter feeds, blog entries, and Reddit comments, are explored in this work. We determine that state-of-the-art methods in stylometry do not perform as well in cross-domain situations (34.3% accuracy) as they do in in-domain situations (83.5% accuracy) and propose methods that improve performance in the cross-domain setting with both feature and classification level techniques which can increase accuracy to up to 70%. In addition to testing these approaches on a large real world dataset, we also examine real world adversarial cases where an author is actively attempting to hide their identity. Being able to identify authors across domains facilitates linking identities across the Internet making this a key security and privacy concern; users can take other measures to ensure their anonymity, but due to their unique writing style, they may not be as anonymous as they believe.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Revell

Epitaphs inscribed on stone record biographical information about the deceased, and in certain cases, the age at death. However, it has been demonstrated that these ages on Roman epitaphs are not an accurate reflection of the demographics of death, but are subject to cultural bias. Using the idea of the ‘life course’, this article explores these cultural biases and their relationship to age and gender structures. Material from Italy suggests that these are tied into ideologies of gender, with adulthood defined by the transition to magistrate for men and wife for women. Material from other areas demonstrates different patterns, and in the case of Etruria, these are shown to be a negotiation between pre-Roman and Romanized customs. The phenomenon of ‘age-rounding’ is also argued to be part of these ideas of correct age.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110088
Author(s):  
Shih-ping Wang ◽  
Wen-Ta Tseng ◽  
Robert Johanson

A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses “we” in academic writing to acknowledge one’s stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun “we” is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the literature, this study conducted a systematic corpus analysis of the use of “we” in the abstracts and conclusions of 400 articles collected from eight leading electrical and electronic (EE) engineering journals. The abstracts and conclusions were extracted to form two subcorpora, and an integrated framework was applied to analyze and seek to explain how we-clusters and we-collocations were employed. Results revealed whether authors’ use of first-person pronouns partially depends on a journal policy. The trend of using “we” showed that a yearly increase occurred in the frequency of “we” in EE journal papers, as well as the existence of three “we-use” types in the article conclusions and abstracts: exclusive, inclusive, and ambiguous. Other possible “we-use” alternatives such as “I” and other personal pronouns were used very rarely—if at all—in either section. These findings also suggest that the present tense was used more in article abstracts, but the present perfect tense was the most preferred tense in article conclusions. Both research and pedagogical implications are proffered and critically discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Feldman ◽  
Ariel Monteserin ◽  
Analía Amandi

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Alilou ◽  
Vassili Kovalev

The aim of this study is to suggest a method for automatic detection and segmentation of the target objects in the microscopic histology/cytology images. The detection is carried out by rectangular shapes then segmentation process starts utilizing flexible agents which are able to move and change their shapes according to a cost function. The agents are rectangular at the beginning then they gradually fit to the corresponding objects using a stochastic reshaping algorithm. The iterative reshaping process is controlled by a cost function and it is resulted in a finer segmentation of the target objects. The cost functional of the proposed method comprised of three terms including the prior shape, regional texture and gradient information. The experiments were carried out using a publicly available microscopy image dataset which contains 510 manually-labeled target cells. The segmentation performance of the proposed method is compared with another state of the art segmentation method. The results demonstrate satisfactory detection and segmentation performance of the proposed method.


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