@inproceedings{al-laith-etal-2024-noise,
    title = "Noise, Novels, Numbers. A Framework for Detecting and Categorizing Noise in {D}anish and {N}orwegian Literature",
    author = "Al-Laith, Ali  and
      Hershcovich, Daniel  and
      Bjerring-Hansen, Jens  and
      Parby, Jakob Ingemann  and
      Conroy, Alexander  and
      Tangherlini, Timothy R",
    editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser  and
      Bansal, Mohit  and
      Chen, Yun-Nung",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2024.emnlp-main.196/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.196",
    pages = "3344--3354",
    abstract = "We present a framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts, demonstrated through its application to Danish and Norwegian literature from the late 19-th century. Noise, understood as {\textquotedblleft}aberrant sonic behaviour,{\textquotedblright} is not only an auditory phenomenon but also a cultural construct tied to the processes of civilization and urbanization.We begin by utilizing topic modeling techniques to identify noise-related documents, followed by fine-tuning BERT-based language models trained on Danish and Norwegian texts to analyze a corpus of over 800 novels.We identify and track the prevalence of noise in these texts, offering insights into the literary perceptions of noise during the Scandinavian {\textquotedblleft}Modern Breakthrough{\textquotedblright} period (1870-1899). Our contributions include the development of a comprehensive dataset annotated for noise-related segments and their categorization into human-made, non-human-made, and musical noises. This study illustrates the framework`s potential for enhancing the understanding of the relationship between noise and its literary representations, providing a deeper appreciation of the auditory elements in literary works, including as sources for cultural history."
}