Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0006599, Fri, 31 May 2002 13:51:21 -0700

Subject
VN, Joyce, & punctuation
Date
Body
From the editor. I ran across this item by chance--an abstract of a
conference paper
at
http://parlevink.cs.utwente.nl/Conferences/Clin2001/abstracts/krahmer.html

It might well be interesting.

" Punctuating Penelope: Memory-based clause detection applied to the
final
chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses"
.
Abstract of Emiel Krahmer & Van den Bosch paper "

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is commonly regarded as one
of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is also
arguably one of the most unreadable ones. One cause for the alleged
unreadibility is the final, 18th
chapter of the book commonly referred to as Penelope. It contains the
"sustained stream of consciousness running through Molly [Bloom]'s
lurid, vulgar, and hectic mind, the mind of a rather hysterical woman,
with commonplace ideas, more or less morbidly sensual, with a rich
strain of music in her and with the quite
abnormal capacity of reviewing her whole life in an uninterrupted verbal
flow" (Nabokov 1980:362). To model this uninterrupted verbal flow,
Joyce left out all forms of interpunction and punctuation from the
Penelope chapter, resulting in an completely unstructured sequence of no
less than 24180 words.

In this talk we report on an explorative study in which
memory-based learning techniques were used to automatically segment
the Penelope chapter. First all 18 chapters were tagged and tokenized
using the Memory-Based Tagger of Daelemans et al. (1996). Then, a
17-fold cross-validation experiment was performed, each time
training on 16 segmented and tagged chapters and testing on the
punctuated chapter which was left-out. The result has an accuracy of
83.3% and an F-beta of 51.3%. This is significantly better than the
baseline. During each fold the learner was applied to the 18th chapter.
In this way, we obtained 17
segmented versions of the Penelope chapter. Subsequently a voting
experiment was performed to obtain a single segmented version of the
Penelope. The result will be discussed and compared with Nabokov's
annotation.

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