cs.CLMar 15, 2026

Computational Analysis of Semantic Connections Between Herman Melville Reading and Writing

Authors: Nudrat Habib, Elisa Barney Smith, Steven Olsen Smith

Organizations: Luleå University of Technology · Boise State University

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Abstract

This study investigates the potential influence of Herman Melville reading on his own writings through computational semantic similarity analysis. Using documented records of books known to have been owned or read by Melville, we compare selected passages from his works with texts from his library. The methodology involves segmenting texts at both sentence level and non-overlapping 5-gram level, followed by similarity computation using BERTScore. Rather than applying fixed thresholds to determine reuse, we interpret precision, recall, and F1 scores as indicators of possible semantic alignment that may suggest literary influence. Experimental results demonstrate that the approach successfully captures expert-identified instances of similarity and highlights additional passages warranting further qualitative examination. The findings suggest that semantic similarity methods provide a useful computational framework for supporting source and influence studies in literary scholarship.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: 5-gram analysis: F1 scores for instance 1 in Table 1 comparing Typee with A visit to the south seas .
Figure 2: Sentence level analysis: F1 scores for instance 1 in Table 1 comparing Typee with A visit to the south seas .
Figure 3: Precision, recall and F1 score values for instance 4 from Table 1 comparing The Natural History of the Sperm Whale and Moby Dick
Figure 4: Heat map for complete text comparison of instance 2 in Table 1 comparing Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter with Israel Potter; His fifty years of exile at the sentence level.
Melville TextRead TextResults
Israel had now been three days without food, except one two-penny loaf. (sentence 11)I had now been three days without food (with the exception of a single two-penny loaf) and felt myself unable much longer to resist the cravings of nature—my spirits, which until now had armed me with fortitude began to forsake me—indeed I was at this moment on the eve of despair! When, calling to mind that grief would only aggravate my calamity, I endeavoured to arm my soul with patience; and habituate myself as well as I could, to woe. Accordingly I roused my spirits; and banishing for a few moments these gloomy ideas, I began to reflect seriously on the methods by which to extricate myself from this labyrinth of horror. (sentence 6)p = 0.80 r = 0.43 F1 = 0.56
presenting a smaller supply than (chunk 301)which containing a small quantity (chunk 88)p = 0.65 r = 0.70 F1 = 0.68
Table 2: Two text pair examples for model discovered parallels from Melville’s Israel Potter; His Fifty Years of Exile and Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter . The first is at the sentence level and the second at the 5-gram level.
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