Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications

Tutorial L

Opera Lyrics

Text Analytics Compared by the Composer and the Century of Composition—Wagner versus Puccini

Gary Miner

Opera lyrics are fairly simple in one sense. They all seem to have to do with love, remorse, trust, and similar interpersonal communications set in a scene from the sea, to a Paris neighborhood, to a serious Wagnerian German scenario. Yet, intuitively we’d expect that the lyrics to operas could be quite different among different centuries of the writing and also among different composers. Most composers chose lyricists to write the words, but some composers also wrote the words to their music. With this intriguing idea, we set out to see if we could generate patterns of words from different composers.

For this tutorial ...