Pride & Prejudice & Word Embedding Distance by Lynn Cherny.
From the webpage:
An experiment: Train a word2vec model on Jane Austen’s books, then replace the nouns in P&P with the nearest word in that model. The graph shows a 2D t-SNE distance plot of the nouns in this book, original and replacement. Mouse over the blue words!
In her blog post, Visualizing Word Embeddings in Pride and Prejudice, Lynn explain more about the project and the process she followed.
From that post:
Overall, the project as launched consists of the text of Pride and Prejudice, with the nouns replaced by the most similar word in a model trained on all of Jane Austen’s books’ text. The resulting text is pretty nonsensical. The blue words are the replaced words, shaded by how close a “match” they are to the original word; if you mouse over them, you see a little tooltip telling you the original word and the score.
I don’t agree that: “The resulting test is pretty nonsensical.”
True, it’s not Jane Austin’s original text and it is challenging to read, but that may be because our assumptions about Pride and Prejudice and literature in general are being defeated by the similar word replacements.
The lack of familiarity and smoothness of a received text may (no guarantees) enable us to see the text differently than we would on a casual re-reading.
What novel corpus would you use for such an experiment?