# Tecnologica cosa: Modeling Storyteller Personalities in Boccaccio's Decameron

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10506/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Pre-train or Annotate? Domain Adaptation with a Constrained Budget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04711/) (2021)
- [Casting Light on Invisible Cities: Computationally Engaging with Literary Criticism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08386/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore Boccaccio's Decameron to see how digital humanities tools can be used for tasks that have limited data in a language no longer in contemporary use: medieval Italian. We focus our analysis on the question: Do the different storytellers in the text exhibit distinct personalities? To answer this question, we curate and release a dataset based on the authoritative edition of the text. We use supervised classification methods to predict storytellers based on the stories they tell, confirming the difficulty of the task, and demonstrate that topic modeling can extract thematic storyteller "profiles."