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SUMMARY:The semantics of poetry: a distributional reading - Aurelie Herbel
 ot
DTSTART:20140307T120000Z
DTEND:20140307T130000Z
UID:TALK50605@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tamara Polajnar
DESCRIPTION:Poetry is rarely a focus of linguistic investigation. This is 
 far from surprising\, as poetic language\, especially in modern and contem
 porary literature\, seems to defy the general rules of syntax and semantic
 s. In this talk\, however\, I will assume that linguistic theories should 
 account for creative uses of language\, down to their most difficult incar
 nations. I will propose that at the semantic level\, what distinguishes po
 etry from other uses of language may be its ability to trace conceptual pa
 tterns which do not belong to everyday discourse but are latent in our sha
 red language structure. Distributional semantics will provide a theoretica
 l and experimental basis for this exploration. \n\nThe talk will first cov
 er the notion of a specific 'semantics of poetry'\, with some help from li
 terary criticism and philosophy. Distributionalism will then be introduced
  as a theory supporting the notion that the meaning of poetry comes from t
 he meaning of ordinary language. I will provide experimental results showi
 ng that a) distributional representations can model the link between ordin
 ary and poetic language\, b) a distributional model can experimentally dis
 tinguish between poetic and randomised textual output\, regardless of the 
 complexity of the poetry involved\, c) there is a stable\, but not immedia
 tely transparent\, layer of meaning in poetry\, which can be captured dist
 ributionally\, across different levels of poetic  complexity.\n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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