The sense of a connection: Automatic tracing of intertextuality by meaning

In literary study, intertextuality refers to the reuse of text, where new meaning or novel stylistic effects have been generated. Most typically in the digital humanities, algorithms for intertextual analysis search for approximate lexical correspondence that can be described as paraphrase. In this article, we look at a complimentary approach that more closely captures the behavior of the reader when faced with meaningful connections between texts in the absence of words that have the same form or stem, which constrains the match to semantics. The technique we employ for identifying such semantic intertextuality is the popular natural language processing strategy of semantic analysis. Unlike the typical scenario for semantic analysis, where a corpus of long form documents is available, we examine the far more limited textual fragments that embody intertextuality. We are primarily concerned with texts from antiquity, where small phrases or passages often form the locus of comparison. In this vein, we look at a specific case study of established parallels between book 1 of Lucan’s Civil War and all of Vergil’s Aeneid. Applying semantic analysis over these texts, we are able to recover parallels that lexical matching cannot, as well as discover new and interesting thematic matches between the two works.