Detecting literary elements in literature and their importance through semantic analysis and literary correlation

• US 10,073,835 B2
• Filed: 12/03/2013
• Issued: 09/11/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 12/03/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Allen, Corville Orain, Carrier, Scott Robert, Woods, Eric
• Primary Examiner(s): Dorvil, Richemond
• Assistant Examiner(s): Le, Thuykhanh
• Application Number:
  US14/094,889
• Publication Number:
  US 20150154177A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,743 Days
• Field of Search: None
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/169 Annotation, e.g. comment data or footnotes
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/30 Semantic analysis

Abstract

Automatic semantic analysis for characterizing and correlating literary elements within a digital work of literature is accomplished by employing natural language processing and deep semantic analysis of text to create annotations for the literary elements found in a segment or in the entirety of the literature, a weight to each literary element and its associated annotations, wherein the weight indicates an importance or relevance of a literary element to at least the segment of the work of literature; correlating and matching the literary elements to each other to establish one or more interrelationships; and producing an overall weight for the correlated matches.

Claims

1. A computer program product for automatic semantic analysis for characterizing and correlating literary elements within a digital work of literature, the computer program product comprising:

a tangible, computer readable memory device which is not a propagating signal per se; and

program instructions encoded by the computer readable memory device for causing a processor to perform operations of;

performing deep semantic analysis of a digital work of literature to create annotations for one or more literary elements, wherein the deep semantic analysis comprises a combination of information retrieval operations, natural language processing, knowledge representation, and machine learning;

assigning weights to one or more of the annotations according to importance and relevance of each annotation as determined by the deep semantic analysis;

identifying, from the deep semantic analysis, one or more plot devices within each literary plot in the digital work of literature, wherein the one or more plot devices are distinguished from general theme and general plot,

associating the one or more plot devices with one or more non-plot device literary elements, and

identifying a theme for each of the one or more plot devices;

combining the importance and relevance weights associated with each respective interrelationship to yield an overall weight for each of the interrelationships; and

producing an output depiction on a user interface device, the annotations, the interrelationships, and the overall weights, for facilitating the user to easily and conveniently see an overall make-up of the work of literature, to be informed of where each literary element exists in that make-up, and to understand relative strengths of each literary element within the context of the make-up.

2. The computer program product as set forth in claim 1 wherein the annotations include one or more annotations selected from the group consisting of humor, imagery, adventure, character, character mood, and suspense.

3. The computer program product as set forth in claim 1 wherein each overall weight is normalized for each literary element and each associated annotation according to one or more calculations selected from the group consisting of normalization across an associated category in which the literary element has been categorized.

4. The computer program product as set forth in claim 1 wherein the correlating and matching comprises assigning to each literary element one or more attributes selected from the group consisting of level of importance within the segment, level of prevalence within the segment, number of parties in a relationship to which the literary element pertains in the segment, and number of plot devices in the segment to which the literary element pertains.

5. A computer system for automatic semantic analysis for characterizing and correlating literary elements within a digital work of literature, the computer system comprising:

a processor and a tangible, computer readable memory device; and

program instructions encoded by the computer readable memory device for causing the processor to perform operations of;

performing deep semantic analysis of a digital work of literature to create annotations for one or more literary elements, wherein the deep semantic analysis comprises a combination of information retrieval operations, natural language processing, knowledge representation, and machine learning;

assigning weights to one or more of the annotations according to importance and relevance of each annotation as determined by the deep semantic analysis;

identifying, from the deep semantic analysis, one or more plot devices within each literary plot in the digital work of literature, wherein the one or more plot devices are distinguished from general theme and general plot,

associating the one or more plot devices with one or more non-plot device literary elements, and

identifying a theme for each of the one or more plot devices;

combining the importance and relevance weights associated with each respective interrelationship to yield an overall weight for each of the interrelationships; and

producing an output depiction on a user interface device, the annotations, the interrelationships, and the overall weights, for facilitating the user to easily and conveniently see an overall make-up of the work of literature, to be informed of where each literary element exists in that make-up, and to understand relative strengths of each literary element within the context of the make-up.

6. The computer system as set forth in claim 5 wherein the annotations include one or more annotations selected from the group consisting of humor, imagery, adventure, character, character mood, and suspense.

7. The computer system as set forth in claim 5 wherein each overall weight is normalized for each literary element and each associated annotation according to one or more calculations selected from the group consisting of normalization across an associated category in which the literary element has been categorized.

8. The computer system as set forth in claim 5 wherein the correlating and matching comprises assigning to each literary element one or more attributes selected from the group consisting of level of importance within the segment, level of prevalence within the segment, number of parties in a relationship to which the literary element pertains in the segment, and number of plot devices in the segment to which the literary element pertains.