Story Operators: Decomposing the Original $\to$ Sequel Transformation in Embedding Space
I treat a book as a point in a sentence-embedding space and a literary transformation as an operation on points. Given an original novel and its sequel, I ask what it takes, geometrically, to turn the first into the second. Using all-mpnet-base-v2 paragraph embeddings drawn from a precomputed index of the PG19 corpus, I form the displacement $d=\bar{x}_{\rm seq}-\bar{x}_{\rm orig}$ and greedily decompose it along a content basis obtained by PCA over the two books' own paragraphs. Each component is an interpretable axis anchored by real passages at its poles. Across thirteen verified author pairs from Project Gutenberg, the decomposition reveals a small taxonomy of sequels: formulaic (a ti...
| Authors | W. Frederick Zimmerman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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