In recent months, artificial intelligence seems to be the solution for almost everything: from passing in class, composing music, designing advertisements to defending defendants in trials or acting as doctors. At Xataka we have witnessed how they have been able to recreate the French Revolution from within, dubbing movies, illustrating comics or answering tweets. Endless academic, cultural, technological and mathematical uses that are rapidly shaping our lifestyle.
Today, thanks to AI, we know many more things. Some that humans were simply unable to accurately analyze. As if an anonymous work for centuries could actually be the work of Lope de Vega.
An investigation carried out by Álvaro Cuéllar, a professor at the University of Vienna, and Germán Vega, a professor at the University of Valladolid, has allowed date and attribute to Lope de Vega The French Lauraa hitherto anonymous comedy kept by the National Library of Spain in its manuscript background. How have they achieved it? With Artificial Intelligence.
Specifically, through text transcription programs, which processed some 1,300 plays from the Golden Age in just a few hours. Something that would have taken a flesh-and-blood investigative team years. Later, it was compared with comedies from the Spanish Golden Age, including those of the author. After almost a year of work, the algorithms concluded that behind those verses was the creator of fuenteovejuna Y The Knight of Olmedo.
This Spanish baroque play had been lost in time. “It is a tradition in which we have a lot of attribution issues because it was a popular and commercial genre,” explained the authors of the study, published in the journal Lope de Vega Yearbook. Text, literature, culturefrom the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
“Without being a masterpiece, The French Laura has sufficient quality to show the mastery of the plots and the words that Lope would have reached in that final stage”, explained the researchers, who have reached the conclusion that it would be a late text of the phoenix of wits.
“It’s lucky
what they love and require,
They look Spanish
that, although it is such a severe nation,
in coming to love
it is the most tender of all”.
They could be anyone’s, but along these lines, artificial intelligence has recognized Lope de Vega’s hand. The first clue was given by Transkribus, a trained software to automatically transcribe manuscripts and recognize historical texts to convert them into digital texts. The next step was to upload the transcript to the platform ETSO (Stylometry applied to the Golden Age Theatre)created by the study authors.
“This system is a corpus which contains some 2,800 comedies by 350 authors, almost all from the 17th century. With this tool, studies are carried out to unravel authorship problems,” says María José Rucio, head of the BNE’s Manuscripts and Incunabula Service.
Finally, a third computer program, Stylo, was in charge of comparing the text in detail with the style of other texts. For example, the 500 most frequent words of the text under investigation with the 500 of the rest of the works. In the case of French Laura, detected that the 100 works with which he was closest were almost all by Lope, and the most similar of all was Punishment without revenge of 1631. The method could identify the date of writing in the same way: 1628.
“In many moments of the play, the characters express themselves in the same way as others in his other comedies,” pointed out other philology experts, who “totally confirmed” the result of the AI, according to the BNE.
It is not the first work to undergo similar scrutiny. In recent years, various processes have been carried out to classify the authorship of works based on the use that each author makes of words or strokes when drawing. Thanks to machine learning Sometimes a 99% accuracy is achieved. And from today, an anonymous work already has an owner.
Images: Wikimedia Commons | BNE
