ID Scheda #24164
- Sezione
- Critica
- Tipo di risorsa
- articolo su periodico culturale
- Autore
- Parigini, Margherita; Kestemon, Mike
- Titolo
- The Roots of Doubt. Fine-tuning a BERT Model to Explore a Stylistic Phenomenon
- Titolo del periodico
- CHR 2022 Computational Humanities Research
- Specifiche del periodico
- 3290
- Luogo di pubblicazione
- Aachen
- Editore
- CEUR Workshop Proceedings
- Data di pubblicazione
- 26 novembre 2022
- Pagine
- 72-91
- Lingua
- inglese
- Paese di pubblicazione
- Germania
- Abstract
- The narrative work of well-known Italian author Italo Calvino (1923-1985) features a phenomenon that literary critics refer to as “dubitative text”: this stylistic device consciously hinders the narrative progression of a story, by questioning its own content. We report on an attempt to model the presence of dubitative text in Calvino’s fictional oeuvre and examine whether this model can also be used to retrieve dubitative instances in his essayistic oeuvre. We hypothesize that precisely the category of the dubitative text yields interesting points of intersection between both writing modes. We fine-tuned a BERT model based on a manually annotated dataset and report inter-annotator scores. We situate our 昀椀ndings and model criticism in the current landscape of Calvino scholarship. While detecting dubitative text is challenging, our model provides fresh insights into the device’s surface features.