How would a robot read a novel?
Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.
