Tales and Truths: Exploring the Linguistic Journey of 19th Century Literature and Non-fiction

Suchana Datta, Dwaipayan Roy, Derek Greene, Gerardine Meaney

Abstract: In this work, we explore the potential of using the lens of information retrieval to reveal societal themes within historical texts. We specifically investigate how term usage evolves over time in the 19th century texts categorised as either fiction or non-fiction. By applying Pseudo-relevance Feedback to a collection of texts from the British Library, segmented by decade, we analyse changes in related terms over time within each category. Our analysis employs standard metrics, such as Kendall’s \(\tau \), Jaccard similarity, and Jensen-Shannon divergence, to assess overlaps and shifts in these expanded term sets. The results reveal significant divergences in related terms across decades, highlighting key linguistic and conceptual changes during the 19th century.

External IDs:dblp:conf/ecir/DattaRGM25