Through the Limits of Newspeak: an Analysis of the Vector Representation of Words in George Orwell’s 1984
Ivan Đunđer, Marko Pavlovski · 2019
The era of fake news, media manipulation and information wars has been beneficent to the lasting fame and continuous acclaim of George Orwell's 1984. The novel, published in 1949, influences to the present day the terminology of various political and social analysts through the use of its fictional language called “Newspeak”. The question arises - can the inner connections of the concepts present in Orwell's 1984, when analysing the text on a semantic level of the words in their contextual environment, be used to further the understanding of the inner-workings of the novel's language itself? More specifically, the aim of this paper is to examine whether a reader without knowledge of the subject of a fictional work of art, exemplified by Orwell's 1984, could gain deeper comprehension of the text just from analysing word vector representations, without the use of external resources and only through an overview of the established similarities on the semantic level of words in a given text. In fact, word vector representations, as a form of word embeddings in a vector space model, are a machine learning technique sometimes applied in natural language processing, which attempts to identify semantically similar words.