Context: This article examines the integration of automated and (manual) hermeneutic methods in literary studies, in relation to the distinctiveness of naturalism and modernism. Semantics in literary texts cannot be automatically detected, but can be heuristically derived through specific linguistic patterns.
Objectives: Our objectives are to analyze semantic structures in literary texts – specifically, indicators of semantic meaning based on linguistic occurrences – and to adapt existing technical solutions while developing new requirements for literary text analysis.
Method: We use a mixed methods approach to analyze and interpret semantic processes, combining typical NLP-based techniques with hermeneutic methods. For this purpose, we transfer the concept of the so-called Quality Defect Detection, which is used in Requirements Engineering. We distinguish semantic categories for classifying linguistic occurrences as ‘findings’ to empirically test whether it is indeed possible to derive unambiguous epochal affiliations on the basis of their frequencies. These findings are manually evaluated by the reviewer in terms of accuracy and recall.
Result: The results indicate an increase in negative words, vague pronouns, universal quantifiers (such as adverbs like “always” and “never”) and long sentences in modern texts. These results are preliminary, as they were generated based on a test corpus and need to be validated on larger corpora.
Conclusion: Although the findings reflect aesthetic programs such as ‘unambiguity’ in naturalism, they interfered with the unambiguity filters used in Requirements Analysis, indicating that the historical category requires further specification and that the filter categories and rules should be adapted.

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Lucke, Alexa und Henning Femmer (2025): “On the Integration of Manual and Automated Processes for the Distinctiveness of Naturalism and Modernism. A Transdisciplinary Approach Between Deterministic and Heuristic Methodologies in Digital Literary Studies“, in: Dennis Möbus et al. (Eds.): Digital Hermeneutics II: Sources, Analysis, Interpretation, Annotation, and Curation. Special Issue of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (= LNCS 14566). Berlin/Heidelberg, pp. 143–164. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08697-6_7