Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2603.01791

Semantic Novelty Trajectories in 80,000 Books: A Cross-Corpus Embedding Analysis

Fred Zimmerman
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

I apply Schmidhuber's compression progress theory of interestingness at corpus scale, analyzing semantic novelty trajectories in more than 80,000 books spanning two centuries of English-language publishing. Using sentence-transformer paragraph embeddings and a running-centroid novelty measure, I compare 28,730 pre-1920 Project Gutenberg books (PG19) against 52,796 modern English books (Books3, approximately 1990-2010). The principal findings are fourfold. First, mean paragraph-level novelty is roughly 10% higher in modern books (0.503 vs. 0.459). Second, trajectory circuitousness -- the ratio of cumulative path length to net displacement in embedding space -- nearly doubles in the modern corpus (+67%). Third, convergent narrative curves, in which novelty declines toward a settled semantic register, are 2.3x more common in pre-1920 literature. Fourth, novelty is orthogonal to reader quality ratings (r = -0.002), suggesting that interestingness in Schmidhuber's sense is structurally independent of perceived literary merit. Clustering paragraph-level trajectories via PAA-16 representations reveals eight distinct narrative-shape archetypes whose distribution shifts substantially between eras. All analysis code and an interactive exploration toolkit are publicly available at https://bigfivekiller.online/novelty_hub.

Explore related subjects

cs.CLcs.IR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Fred Zimmerman. 2026-03-02. Semantic Novelty Trajectories in 80,000 Books: A Cross-Corpus Embedding Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01791

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various reasoning tasks, which leads to the development of increasingly large models. However, scaling up model sizes results in significantly higher computational costs and energy consumption, which makes these models impractical for academic researchers and businesses with limited resources. At the same time, Small Models (SMs) are frequently used in practical settings, although their significance is currently underestimated. This raises important questions about the role of small models in the era of LLMs, a topic that has received limited attention in prior surveys. In this work, we systematically examine the relationship between LLMs and SMs from two key perspectives: Collaboration and Competition (or Complementarity). We hope this survey provides valuable insights for practitioners, fostering a deeper understanding of the contribution of small models and promoting more efficient use of computational resources.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

A Course Intelligence Platform for Higher Education: Lessons from AI-Assisted Course Evaluation

The rapid adoption of generative AI has created new opportunities for teaching, learning, and quality assurance. Existing applications, however, remain largely student-facing, with comparatively limited attention to institution-level needs. This paper presents a course intelligence platform deployed across more than 100 universities and serving over 10,000 instructors in China. By linking competency requirements, knowledge structures, teaching activities, and assessment evidence, it establishes a shared foundation for knowledge organization, instructional design, learning assessment, and quality evaluation. The course evaluation module is examined as a representative institution-facing application of the platform, which integrates national evaluation standards, structured educational evidence, customized prompting strategies, and domain-adapted LLMs to generate quantitative scores and qualitative feedback. A case study involving 100 authentic university courses is conducted to evaluate its alignment with expert judgments and the interpretability of its outputs. Statistical analyses show substantial agreement between AI-generated assessments and expert ratings, while qualitative results highlight the credibility of the feedback. The findings further suggest that AI-assisted evaluation requires not only capable models but also structured domain knowledge and transparent criteria. In this context, human ratings should be treated as an informative reference rather than an error-free gold standard, and the objective is to achieve consistent, interpretable, and defensible judgments instead of merely replicating expert scores.

cs.CL↗