PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper presents a pilot study into the operationalization of textual forms of comparison, following the typology provided by Davy et al (2019), using them to analyze Swiss Literary histories (1861-1951) regardin the usage of comparisons. In doing so, we propose a semi-automatic approach to identify discrete entities as potential comparata based on a lexicon of nation-related entities; we develop an annotation process for this typology of comparisons to evaluate sentences for dimensionality or valence. Thus, we provide two achievements: (1) a possible operationalization of comparison, and (2) a novel distant reading method for detecting evaluative assessment in texts.