Michael Richter


2025

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Can information theory unravel the subtext in a Chekhovian short story?
J. Nathanael Philipp | Olav Mueller-Reichau | Matthias Irmer | Michael Richter | Max Kölbl
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Slavic Natural Language Processing (Slavic NLP 2025)

In this study, we investigate whether information-theoretic measures such as surprisal can quantify the elusive notion of subtext in a Chekhovian short story. Specifically, we conduct a series of experiments for which we enrich the original text once with (different types of) meaningful glosses and once with fake glosses. For the different texts thus created, we calculate the surprisal values using two methods: using either a bag-of-words model or a large language model. We observe enrichment effects depending on the method, but no interpretable subtext effect.

2023

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Are idioms surprising?
J. Nathanael Philipp | Michael Richter | Erik Daas | Max Kölbl
Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2023)