Re-evaluating the Tomes for the Times

Ryan Brate, Marieke van Erp, Antal van den Bosch


Abstract
Literature is to some degree a snapshot of the time it was written in and the societal attitudes of the time. Not all depictions are pleasant or in-line with modern-day sensibilities; this becomes problematic when the prevalent depictions over a large body of work are negatively biased, leading to their normalisation. Many much-loved and much-read classics are set in periods of heightened social inequality: slavery, pre-womens’ rights movements, colonialism, etc. In this paper, we exploit known text co-occurrence metrics with respect to token-level level contexts to identify prevailing themes associated with known problematic descriptors. We see that prevalent, negative depictions are perpetuated by classic literature. We propose that such a methodology could form the basis of a system for making explicit such problematic associations, for interested parties: such as, sensitivity coordinators of publishing houses, library curators, or organisations concerned with social justice
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
13734–13739
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1199
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryan Brate, Marieke van Erp, and Antal van den Bosch. 2024. Re-evaluating the Tomes for the Times. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 13734–13739, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Re-evaluating the Tomes for the Times (Brate et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1199.pdf