Hamlet Seen through the Python’s Eyes

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play an increasingly vital role in almost all scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, and literary and translation studies. English language learners, teachers, scholars, and practitioners make use of online resources such as monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, thesauri (containing synonyms and antonyms), Internet fora, weblogs, and corpora. Moreover, they are familiar with search engines (e.g. Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, and HotBot), which provide access to various authentic sources, and which serve to locate appropriate terms, collocations, idioms, and parallel texts.This paper aims to explore the speeches of the characters in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet through a combination of machine learning and word embeddings using a programming language Python. The main objective is to find out whether artificial intelligence is able to understand Shakespeare’s characters and the nuances of their speeches in a manner similar to that of Shakespearean scholars. Finally, the functionality and usefulness of indexing textual cases using continuous space vector representations of words in the selected “Shakespearean semantic space” will be demonstrated.