How AI Is Revolutionising The Role of The Literary Critic - Aeon Essays

How AI is revolutionising the role of the literary critic | Aeon...
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When robots read books

Artificial intelligence sheds new light on classic
texts. Literary theorists who dont embrace it face
obsolescence
Inderjeet Mani
Where do witches come from, and what do those places have in
common? While browsing a large collection of traditional Danish
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folktales, the folklorist Timothy Tangherlini and his colleague Peter

Broadwell, both at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided
to nd out. Armed with a geographical index and some 30,000
stories, they developed WitchHunter <http://etkspace.scandinavian.ucla.edu/maps/witchhunter.html> , an interactive
geo-semantic map of Denmark that highlights the hotspots for
witchcraft.
The system used articial intelligence (AI) techniques to unearth a
trove of surprising insights. For example, they found that evil
sorcery often took place close to Catholic monasteries. This made a
certain amount of sense, since Catholic sites in Denmark were
tarred with diabolical associations after the Protestant Reformation
in the 16th century. By plotting the distance and direction of
witchcraft relative to the storytellers location, WitchHunter also
showed that enchantresses tend to be found within the local
community, much closer to home than other kinds of threats.
Witches and robbers are human threats to the economic stability of
the community, the researchers write. Yet, while witches threaten
from within, robbers are generally situated at a remove from the
well-described village, often living in woods, forests, or the heath
it seems that no matter how far one goes, nor where one turns, one
is in danger of encountering a witch.
Such computational folkloristics raise a big question: what can
algorithms tell us about the stories we love to read? Any proposed
answer seems to point to as many uncertainties as it resolves,
especially as AI technologies grow in power. Can literature really be
sliced up into computable bits of information, or is there
something about the experience of reading that is irreducible?
Could AI enhance literary interpretation, or will it alter the eld of
literary criticism beyond recognition? And could algorithms ever
derive meaning from books in the way humans do, or even produce
literature themselves?
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C omputer science isnt as far removed from the study of literature

as you might think. Most contemporary applications of AI consist of
sophisticated methods for learning patterns, often through the
creation of labels for large, unwieldy data-sets based on structures
that emerge from within the data itself. Similarly, not so long ago,
examining the form and structure of a work was a central focus of
literary scholarship. The structuralist strand of literary theory tends
to deploy close sometimes microscopic readings of a text to see
how it functions, almost like a closed system. This is broadly known
as a formal mode of literary interpretation, in contrast to more
historical or contextual ways of reading.
The so-called cultural turn in literary studies since the 1970s, with
its debt to postmodern understandings of the relationship between
power and narrative, has pushed the eld away from such
systematic, semi-mechanistic ways of analysing texts. AI remains
concerned with formal patterns, but can nonetheless illuminate key
aspects of narrative, including time, space, characters and plot.
Consider the opening sentence of Gabriel Garca Mrquezs One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): Many years later, as he faced the
ring squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that
distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. The
complex way in which Mrquez represents the passage of time is a
staple of modern ction. The time corresponding to Many years
later includes the fateful time of facing the ring squad, which in
turn is simultaneous with that nal remember-ing, which is years
after that distant afternoon. In a single sentence, Mrquez paints a
picture of events in the eeting present, memories of the past and
visions for the future.
According to numerous psychological <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8685900_Representing_a_Described_Sequence_of_Events_A_Dynamic_View_of_Narrative_Comprehension> studies <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12109767> ,
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when we read such stories, we construct timelines. We represent to

ourselves whether events are mentioned before, after or
simultaneous with each other, and how far apart they are in time.
Likewise, AI systems have also been able to learn timelines
<http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P09-1046.pdf> for a variety of
narrative texts in dierent <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology
/S10-1010> languages <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology
/C12-1179> , including news <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=7ySorPIAAAAJ&citation_for_view=7ySorPIAAAAJ:d1gkVwhDpl0C> , fables
<http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P12-1010> , short stories
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.01696> and clinical
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&
hl=en&user=sXM8J5EAAAAJ&citation_for_view=sXM8J5EAAAAJ:qjMakFHDy7sC> narratives
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article
/pii/S1532046413001512> .
In most cases, this analysis involves whats known as supervised
machine learning, in which algorithms train themselves from
collections of texts that a human has laboriously labelled.
Timeframes in narratives can be represented using a widely used
annotation standard called TimeML <http://timeml.org/> (which I
helped to develop). Once a collection (or corpus) of texts is
annotated and fed into an AI program, the system can learn rules
that let it accurately identify the timeline in other new texts,
including the passage from Mrquez. TimeML can also measure the
tempo or pace of the narrative, by analysing the relationship
between events in the text and the time intervals between them.
AI annotation schemes are versatile and

expressive, but theyre not foolproof
The presence of narrative zigzag movements in ction is one of the
Th
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intriguing insights to emerge from this kind of analysis. Its evident

in this passage from Marcel Prousts posthumously published novel
Jean Santeuil (1952), the precursor to his magnum opus In Search of
Lost Time (1913-27):
Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered
the rainy days when he used to bring his nursemaid that
far, on a pilgrimage. But he remembered them without the
melancholy that he then thought he would surely some
day savour on feeling that he no longer loved her.
The narrative here oscillates between two poles, as the French

structuralist critic Grard Genette observed in Narrative Discourse
(1983): the now of the recurring events of remembering while
passing in front of the hotel, and the once or then of the thoughts
remembered, involving those rainy days with his nursemaid.
Even though AI annotation schemes are versatile and expressive,
theyre not foolproof. Longer, book-length texts are prohibitively
expensive to annotate, so the power of the algorithms is restricted
by the quantity of data available for training them. Even if this
tagging were more economical, machine-learning systems tend to
fare better on simpler narratives and on relating events that are
mentioned closer together in the text. The algorithms can be foxed
by scene-setting descriptive prose, as in this sentence from Honor
de Balzacs novella Sarrasine (1831), in which the four states being
described should (arguably) overlap with each other:
The trees, being partly covered with snow, were outlined
indistinctly against the greyish background formed by a
cloudy sky, barely whitened by the moon.
AI criticism is also limited by the accuracy of human labellers, who
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must carry out a close reading of the training texts before the AI
can kick in. Experiments <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667942/pdf/nihms-106359.pdf> show that readers tend
to take longer to process events that are distant in time or separated
by a time shift (such as a day later). Such processing creates room
for error, although distributing standard annotation guidelines to
users can reduce it. People also have a hard time
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&
hl=en&user=XdcULRkAAAAJ&citation_for_view=XdcULRkAAAAJ:W7OEmFMy1HYC> imagining temporally complex
situations, such as the mind-bending ones described in Alan
Lightmans novel Einsteins Dreams (1992):
For in this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
Each future moves in a dierent direction of time. Each
future is real. At every point of decision, whether to visit a
woman in Fribourg or to buy a new coat, the world splits
into three worlds, each with the same people, but dierent
fates for those people. In time, there are an innity of
worlds.
S potting temporal patterns might be fun and informative, but isnt

literature more than the sum of the information lurking in its
patterns? Of course, there might be phenomenological aspects of
storytelling that remain ineable, including the totality of the work
itself. Even so, literary interpretation is often an inferential process.
It requires sifting through and comparing chunks of information
about literatures form and context from the text itself, from its
historical and cultural background, from authorial biographies,
critiques and social-media reactions, and from the readers prior
experience. All of this is data, and eminently minable.
I dont think its too outlandish to suggest that an automaton might
one day be able to simulate, for itself, the feelings we have when we
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read a story.At the moment, AI systems are notoriously bad at an

important aspect of how humans make meaning from words: the
ability to discern the context in which statements occur.Buttheyre
getting better.Automaticsentiment <http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/s00416ed1v01y201204hlt016>
andirony <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W14-2609>
detectors are exposing some of the hidden associations lurking
below the surface of texts. Meanwhile, social robots are also starting
to improve their emotional intelligence.
Like many other AI practitioners, Im a philosophical functionalist: I
believe that a cognitive state, such as one derived from reading,
should not be dened by what it is made of in terms of hardware or
biology, but instead by how it functions, in relation to inputs, outputs
and other cognitive states. (Opponents of functionalism include
behaviourists who insist that mental states are nothing other than
dispositions to behave in certain ways and mind-brain identity
theorists who argue that mental states are identical with particular
neural states, and are tied to specic biological hardware.)
Whether we like it or not,slicing up a text into

comparable bits is already an undeniable part
of our critical repertoire
Machines, in the functionalist view, can therefore be said to
experience certain basic cognitive states. Siri understood my
request, in relation to the iPhone, means that Siri processed my
request to achieve a desired functional outcome. Similarly, Th
The
system understands temporal relations, in relation to an algorithm
for analysing text, simply means that it digested and produced a
functional timeline that is similar to a human one. A functionalist
stance also allows for a comparison of qualitative experiences or
qualia <http://www.ch.usp.br/df/opessoa/Dennett-QuiningQualia.pdf> . I have my own subjective experience of the
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translation of the last haiku written by Matsuo Bash, a

17th-century Japanese poet:
Sick on a journey
over parched elds
dreams wander on.
While my experience of reading these lines is private and dierent

from anyone elses, it can be compared with yours or a computers
by experimentally testing how similar our reactions are.
This empirical kind of analysis might strike the sensitive reader of
ction or poetry as rather strange. Algorithms are still very far o
being able to produce the full range of functional outputs that a
human can upon digesting a text. But if it werent possible to
compare the eects of dierent subjective experiences of reading, it
would make no sense to talk of literature resonating among
dierent people, either between the writer and the reader or among
multiple readers. Yet thats exactly what literature does. Whether we
like it or not, slicing up a text into comparable bits is already an
undeniable part of our critical repertoire. And, as research into
machine intelligence progresses, such functional, computational
analysis promises to become only more signicant.
A lgorithms might be poor at grasping context, but they excel at
sifting through large amounts of data. This means theyre
well-suited to what Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab calls
distant reading <https://www.versobooks.com/books/1421-distant-reading> a zoomed-out, macroscopic literary analysis of
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of texts. By crunching through
this big data, Moretti and his followers hope to discover aspects of
literature that are invisible to scholars who go about merely reading
books.
Conversation is one area where computational methodology has
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been shown to trump the claims of literary scholars even

scientically inclined ones. In his Atlas of the European Novel (1999),
Moretti suggested that the bustling urban setting of much
19th-century ction tends to involve more characters but less
dialogue, compared with narratives set within the connes of the
family in the village or the countryside. A group of computational
linguists and literary scholars at Columbia University decided to investigate <http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~delson/pubs/ACL2010ElsonDamesMcKeown.pdf> this claim, using software that built a
conversational social network from a corpus of 60 novels from the
19th century.
The software parsed each sentence in terms of its syntax, and then
found references to people. It also agged stretches of quoted
speech and attributed the quotes to speakers. This allowed the
system to discern who was talking to whom. Although Morettis
theory predicted an inverse correlation between the amount of
dialogue and the number of characters, these scholars found no
such statistically signicant eect. Instead, they discovered
thatnarrative voice, such as rst- or third-person narration, was
more relevant than the setting in urban or rural environments.
Characters are another area ripe for empirical re-examination.
Readers often have strong intuitions about ctional gures. We
recognise the imprint of an individual author, seeing characters as,
say, Dickensian or Kafkaesque. We are also aware that characters
can fall into certain functional classes across dierent works. Its
clear that a villain such as Lord Voldemort resembles Count Dracula
more than he does his antagonist, the hero Harry Potter.
The computational linguist David Bamman, now at the University of
California, Berkeley, and colleagues, mined a database of more than
15,000 novels to produce <http://acl2014.org/acl2014/P14-1
/pdf/P14-1035.pdf> a Bayesian statistical model that could predict
dierent character types. They used features such as the actions that
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a person participates in, the objects they possess, and their

attributes. The system was able to identify cases where two
characters by the same author happen to be more similar to each
other than to a closely related character by a dierent author. So the
system discovered that Wickham in Jane Austens Pride and
Prejudice (1813) resembles Willoughby in her Sense and Sensibility
(1811), more than either character resembles Mr Rochester in
Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre (1847).
Theycan discover trajectories from a database

of 1,300 novels thiswould take literary
scholars a huge amount of time
The computer could also tell when protagonists by the same author
are distinguished, for example, by being more thoughtful. Their
system infers that Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, one of
Austens most popular characters, resembles Elinor Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility more than either character resembles
Elizabeths foolish, marriage-obsessed mother, Mrs Bennet. Having
a human specify what underlies these scholarly intuitions is hard,
but the computer has little diculty spotting and testing them.
Algorithms are also becoming adept at unpicking the knotty
entanglements of characters relationships. For example, the
computer scientist Mohit Iyyer and colleagues at the University of
Maryland have developed <https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer
/pubs/2016_naacl_relationships.pdf> a system that discovers, from
reading Bram Stokers Dracula (1897), the correct trajectory of the
relationship between Arthur and Lucy, which starts with love and
ends with murder. Their method can correctly discover numerous
other trajectories from a database of more than 1,300 novels
inferences that would take literary scholars a huge amount of time
to detect.
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Its not hard to imagine a near-term scenario where a character such

as Robin Hood could be tracked through time across multiple texts.
He starts out as a cut-throat, anti-clerical outlaw who robs the rich
to help the poor; moves to his 19th-century incarnation as a
regional hero battling the Norman nobles; and ends up as a fox in a
Disney lm. To a scholar attuned to the cultural turn in literary
studies, the details of Robin Hoods transformation through time
could reveal facts about class conict, the interactions of literature
and power, and the constraints and pressures of mass
entertainment.
I n 1928, the Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp published an inventory <http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/propp.pdf> of 31
narrative archetypes or functions that underpin common Russian
folktales. In the narrative function of Villainy, for example, a villain
abducts someone, while in Receipt of a Magical Agent, a character
can place himself at the disposal of the hero.
Could an algorithm today generate and improve upon Propps
narrative functions? In his AI dissertation <http://users.cis.u.edu
/~markaf/doc/nlayson.2012.thesis.mit.phd.pdf> at MIT, the
computer scientist Mark Finlayson built a system that drew on an
annotated English translation of Propps Russian corpus. He
discovered several new narrative plot structures nding, for
example, that kidnapping, seizing and tormenting are the hallmarks
of Proppian villainy.
Until this sort of analysis came along, nding and examining the
morphologies of folklore took years of careful reading and analysis.
Though structuralism is no longer in fashion among literary
scholars, computational embodiments of these insights have led to
intriguing results. Using Propps narrative functions, a group of AI
researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid have
developed a system known as PropperWryter, which automatically
generates Russian-style fairy tales. The results are still rudimentary,
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but intriguing all the same:

Once upon a time there was a princess. The princess said
not to go outside. The princess went outside. The princess
heard about the lioness. The lioness scared the princess.
The lioness kidnapped the princess. The knight
departured. The knight and the lioness fought. The knight
won the ght. The knight solved the problem of the
princess. The knight returned. A big treasure to the
knight.
The team have since extended the tool to create plot lines for
musical theatre including Beyond the Fence, the rst ever
computer-generated musical, which ran for several weeks at the
Arts Theatre in Londonthis year.
Suchexperiments raise the tantalising possibility that AI systems
could beliterary creators themselves one day. Several years ago,
Marc Cavazza and his colleagues at Teesside University in
Middlesbrough built an immersive interactive storytelling system
<http://tees.openrepository.com/tees/bitstream/10149/58296
/4/58296.pdf> in virtual reality, using excerpts of Gustave
Flauberts novel Madame Bovary (1857). Human users took on the
role of a character and interacted with Emma Bovary to inuence
the plot outcomes. The developers created an inventory of character
feelings based on Flauberts preliminary studies for the novel.
Without algorithmic assistance, researchers

would be hard-pressed to make such
intriguing ndings
In one path through the system, by the time her aair has been
going on for a while, Emma is comfortable with the risk of adultery,
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and also swayed by Rodolphes power over her. These states are
preconditions for her expressing her feelings to Rodolphe, causing
her to tell him: There are times when I long to see you again! At
this juncture, the user (in the role of Rodolphe) could reply: I will
leave you and never see you again. This response will make Emma
angry and trigger a chain of events, including regret for falling for
Rodolphe, and discovery of happiness in family life (an outcome
that might have upset Flaubert). On other occasions
<https://ive.scm.tees.ac.uk/data/media/lugrin-vrst2010.pdf> ,
users ended up drastically curtailing the story by providing
excessive emotional input to an already overwrought Emma.
More recently, these researchers have focused
<https://ive.scm.tees.ac.uk/data/media/aamas13-porteousfull.pdf> on generating animated medical soap operas involving
virtual characters such as doctors, nurses and patients. Participants
can specify certain social relations between characters, such as
extreme antagonism between a pair. These choices produce
unpredictable narrative actions, such as the spreading of malicious
gossip, and result in the creation of an episode
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=102&v=enMzP0kvNH8> that users can watch.
Computational analysis and traditional literary interpretation need
not be a winner-takes-all scenario. Digital technology has already
started to blur the line between creators and critics. In a similar way,
literary critics should start combining their deep expertise with
ingenuity in their use of AI tools, as Broadwell and Tangherlini did
with WitchHunter. Without algorithmic assistance, researchers
would be hard-pressed to make such supernaturally intriguing
ndings, especially as the quantity and diversity of writing
proliferates online.
In the future, scholars who lean on digital helpmates are likely to
dominate the rest, enriching our literary culture and changing the
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kinds of questions that can be explored. Those who resist the

temptation to unleash the capabilities of machines will have to
content themselves with the pleasures aorded by smaller-scale,
and fewer, discoveries. While critics and book reviewers may
continue to be an essential part of public cultural life, literary
theorists who do not embrace AI will be at risk of becoming an
exotic species like the librarians who once used index cards to
searchfor information.
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When robots read books