Semantic Novelty Trajectories in 80,000 Books: A Cross-Corpus Embedding Analysis
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 ...
| Authors | Fred Zimmerman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 March 2026 |
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