Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy

Understand

This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text.

• In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes.
• To address it, we have created the first dataset for atypical animacy detection, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English, with machines represented as either animate or inanimate.
• Our method builds on recent innovations in language modeling, specifically BERT contextualized word embeddings, to better capture fine-grained contextual properties of words.