The Shape of Testimony: A Scalable Framework for Oral History Archive Comparison
Researchers in Holocaust studies have often distinguished between two styles of oral survivor testimony: the USC Shoah Foundation's interviews tend to follow a structured, interviewer-guided format, whereas the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive generally favors a more free-form, open-ended style. This distinction has influenced both scholarly research and the development of later archives. In this study, we critically examine that claim by conducting a large-scale computational analysis of more than 1,600 testimonies from both collections. Leveraging discourse segmentation, topic modeling, and large language model (LLM) based analysis, we quantify the "structuredness" level of testimonies thro...
| Authors | Itamar Trainin, Renana Keydar, Amit Pinchevski |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 May 2026 |
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