BOUKHALED Mohamed Amine

PhD student at Sorbonne University
Team : ACASA
https://perso.lip6.fr/Mohamed.Boukhaled

Supervision : Jean-Gabriel GANASCIA

On computational stylistics: mining literary texts for the extraction of characterizing stylistic patterns

The present thesis locates itself in the interdisciplinary field of computational stylistics, namely the application of statistical and computational methods to the study of literary style. Historically, most of the work done in computational stylistics has been focused on lexical aspects especially in the early decades of the discipline. However, in this thesis, our focus is put on the syntactic aspect of style which is quite much harder to capture and to analyze given its abstract nature. As main contribution, we work on an approach to the computational stylistic study of classic French literary texts based on a hermeneutic point of view, in which discovering interesting linguistic patterns is done without any prior knowledge. More concretely, we focus on the development and the extraction of complex yet computationally feasible stylistic features that are linguistically motivated, namely morpho-syntactic patterns. Following the hermeneutic line of thought, we propose a knowledge discovery process for the stylistic characterization with an emphasis on the syntactic dimension of style by extracting relevant patterns from a given text. This knowledge discovery process consists of two main steps, a sequential pattern mining step followed by the application of some interestingness measures. In particular, the extraction of all possible syntactic patterns of a given length is proposed as a particularly useful way to extract interesting features in an exploratory scenario. We propose, carry out an experimental evaluation and report results on three proposed interestingness measures, each of which is based on a different theoretical linguistic and statistical backgrounds.

Defence : 09/13/2016

Jury members :

Jean-Luc MINEL, Professeur [Rapporteur]
Thierry POIBEAU, Directeur de Recherche [Rapporteur]
Valérie BEAUDOUIN Valérie, Directrice d’Études
Jean-Gabriel GANASCIA, Professeur
Christophe MARSALA, CHRISTOPHE Professeur
Henry SOLDANO, Maître de Conférences

Departure date : 09/30/2017

2014-2018 Publications