@inproceedings{van-cranenburgh-2018-cliche,
    title = "Cliche Expressions in Literary and Genre Novels",
    author = "van Cranenburgh, Andreas",
    editor = "Alex, Beatrice  and
      Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania  and
      Feldman, Anna  and
      Kazantseva, Anna  and
      Reiter, Nils  and
      Szpakowicz, Stan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Joint {SIGHUM} Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/W18-4504/",
    pages = "34--43",
    abstract = "Should writers {\textquotedblleft}avoid clich{\'e}s like the plague{\textquotedblright}? Clich{\'e}s are said to be a prominent characteristic of {\textquotedblleft}low brow{\textquotedblright} literature, and conversely, a negative marker of {\textquotedblleft}high brow{\textquotedblright} literature. Clich{\'e}s may concern the storyline, the characters, or the style of writing. We focus on clich{\'e} expressions, ready-made stock phrases which can be taken as a sign of uncreative writing. We present a corpus study in which we examine to what extent clich{\'e} expressions can be attested in a corpus of various kinds of contemporary fiction, based on a large, curated lexicon of clich{\'e} expressions. The results show to what extent the negative view on clich{\'e}s is supported by data: we find a significant negative correlation of -0.48 between clich{\'e} density and literary ratings of texts. We also investigate interactions with genre and characterize the language of clich{\'e}s with several basic textual features. Code used for this paper is available at \url{https://github.com/andreasvc/litcliches/}"
}