Semantic and sentiment trajectories of literary masterpieces

Abstract

The paper deals with semantic and sentiment trajectories of literary masterpieces (we used corpora of 12 languages of various language families), composed of individual embeddings or n-grams. We ascertain that, for all languages, semantic and sentiment trajectories are markedly chaotic: positive largest Lyapunov exponents; ‘entropy-complexity’ pairs belonging to the ‘chaotic’ area of the respective plane; the distinctive ‘chaotic’ drop of the number of false nearest neighbours at a particular value of an embedding dimension. The Russian language turns out to be more ‘chaotic’ than, for example, the English one; we attribute this fact to the free order of words. The Esperanto language, for various ‘approaches’ to different Indo-European languages. The results do not corroborate its claim to be equidistant from all languages. However, it seems to be equidistant from all Indo-European languages. These characteristics are utilised in order to develop a method to compare styles of an original masterpiece and its translations (to automatically assess translation quality). It appears that machine translations are still worse than human ones, however, for example, the Facebook translation is comparable with them.