There has been much research on the nature of dialogues in the Bible. While the research literature abounds with qualitative analyses on these dialogues, they are rarely corroborated on statistics from the entire text. In this article, we leverage a corpus of annotated direct speech in the New Testament, as well as recent advances in automatic speaker and listener identification, to present a quantitative study on dialogue structure in the Gospels. The contributions of this article are three-fold. First, we quantify a variety of features that are widely used in characterizing dialogue structure—including dialogue length, turn length, and the initiation and conclusion of a dialogue—and show how they distinguish between different Gospels. Second, we compare our statistics with qualitative comments in the New Testament research literature, and extend them to cover the entirety of the Gospels. Most significantly, we gauge the feasibility of applying our approach to other literary works, by measuring the amount of errors that would be introduced by automatically identified dialogues, speakers and listeners.

中文翻译：

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对话分析：新约案例研究

关于圣经对话性质的研究很多。尽管研究文献中对这些对话进行了定性分析，但从整个文本的统计数据来看，它们很少得到证实。在本文中，我们利用了新约中带注释的直接语音语料库，以及说话人和听众自动识别的最新进展，提出了有关福音对话结构的定量研究。本文的贡献是三方面的。首先，我们将量化用于表征对话结构的各种功能（包括对话长度，转弯长度以及对话的开始和结束），并说明它们如何区分不同的福音。其次，我们将统计数据与新约研究文献中的定性注释进行比较，并扩展它们以覆盖整个福音。最重要的是，我们通过测量自动识别的对话，说话者和听众会引入的错误数量，来评估将我们的方法应用于其他文学作品的可行性。