{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-historical-significance-of-textual","title":"The Historical Significance of Textual Distances","arxiv_id":"1807.00181","date":"2018-06-30","proceeding":"COLING 2018 8","authors":["Ted Underwood"],"abstract":"Measuring similarity is a basic task in information retrieval, and now often\na building-block for more complex arguments about cultural change. But do\nmeasures of textual similarity and distance really correspond to evidence about\ncultural proximity and differentiation? To explore that question empirically,\nthis paper compares textual and social measures of the similarities between\ngenres of English-language fiction. Existing measures of textual similarity\n(cosine similarity on tf-idf vectors or topic vectors) are also compared to new\nstrategies that use supervised learning to anchor textual measurement in a\nsocial context.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00181v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.00181v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-historical-significance-of-textual","repo_url":"https://github.com/tedunderwood/genredistance","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}