Accession Number:

ADA455142

Title:

A Preliminary Statistical Investigation into the Impace of an N-Gram Analysis Approach Based on World Syntactic Categories Toward Text Author Classification

Descriptive Note:

Conference paper

Corporate Author:

MARYLAND UNIV COLLEGE PARK INST FOR ADVANCED COMPUTER STUDIES

Personal Author(s):

• Diab, Mona
• Schuster, John
• Bock, Peter

Report Date:

2000-06-01

Pagination or Media Count:

14.0

Abstract:

Quantitative analysis of literary style has heretofore utilized semantic elements-word counts. This research attempts to identify quantifiable syntactic elements of style that can be used for author identification. The measurement of syntactic elements utilizes a dictionary with one part of speech per word and looks at phrases delimited by punctuation marks. Different size permutations of words - referred to as grams - are counted within each text. Correlations are measured amongst the gram frequencies of eight texts pertaining to four authors, both contemporary and non-contemporary. The correlations are performed across different gram sizes of words. The same treatment is applied to a target text, the Funeral Elegy text. The approach holds for classifying texts temporally consistently across the various gram sizes. Yet a finer grained investigation is required to certify the authorship of the Funeral Elegy text.

Descriptors:

• *QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
• *WRITING
• *SYNTAX
• MEASUREMENT
• STATISTICS
• DICTIONARIES
• IDENTIFICATION
• WORDS(LANGUAGE)
• SPEECH
• PERMUTATIONS

Subject Categories:

• Linguistics

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE