Detecting the strange: automatic recognition and evaluation of defamiliarization in modernist poetry

Ziyi Yang

doi:10.54254/2977-3903/2025.27219

Advances in Engineering InnovationOpen access

Detecting the strange: automatic recognition and evaluation of defamiliarization in modernist poetry

Research Article

Open Access

Detecting the strange: automatic recognition and evaluation of defamiliarization in modernist poetry

Ziyi Yang ^1*

¹ Department of Computer Science, Central South University

^*Corresponding author: 8208240708@csu.edu.cn

Published on 24 September 2025

AEI Vol.16 Issue 9

ISSN (Print): 2977-3911

ISSN (Online): 2977-3903

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Abstract

This study addresses the long-standing gap between literary theory and computational modeling by focusing on defamiliarization, a central technique in modernist poetics. While defamiliarization has been extensively theorized in literary studies, its computational treatment remains limited due to its semantic complexity and subjective nature. To operationalize this phenomenon, the research introduces MelPoet, a poetics-informed neural architecture adapted from MelBERT. Two tasks are formulated: defamiliarization identification as binary classification, and defamiliarization scoring as regression of estrangement intensity. A curated dataset of modernist poetry and control texts was annotated for both presence and degree of defamiliarization. Experimental results demonstrate that MelPoet substantially outperforms strong baselines in both classification accuracy and scoring correlation, confirming the efficacy of its theory-driven design. This work not only advances computational methods for modelling figurative language but also provides a systematic framework for integrating literary concepts into natural language processing, thereby opening new avenues for large-scale, data-driven analysis of poetic style.

Keywords:

Natural Language Processing(NLP), defamiliarization, MelBERT, modernist poetry

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References

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References

[1]. Shklovsky, V. (1965). Art as technique. InL. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (Trans.), Russian formalist criticism: Four essays(pp. 3-24). University of Nebraska Press.

[2]. Eliot, T. S. (2003). The waste land. InF. Kermode (Ed.), The waste land and other poems(pp. 51-85). Penguin Classics.

[3]. Pound, E. (1990). Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound.New Directions.

[5]. Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and poetics. InT. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language(pp. 350-377). MIT Press.

[8]. Jia, K., Wu, Y., Liu, M., & Li, R. (2024). Curriculum-style data augmentation for llm-based metaphor detection. arXiv. https: //arxiv.org/abs/2412.02956.

[12]. Jakobson, R. (1987). Language in literature (K. Pomorska & S. Rudy, Eds.). Harvard University Press.

[13]. Gao, G., Choi, E., Choi, Y., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2018). Neural metaphor detection in context. arXiv. https: //arxiv.org/abs/1808.09653.

Cite this article

Yang,Z. (2025). Detecting the strange: automatic recognition and evaluation of defamiliarization in modernist poetry. Advances in Engineering Innovation,16(9),1-5.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

About volume

Journal: Advances in Engineering Innovation

Volume number: Vol.16

Issue number: Issue 9

ISSN: 2977-3903(Print) / 2977-3911(Online)

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