[OT] Text analysis and author, anyone done it?

[David Glasgow]

On 1 Jul 2011, at 5:29 pm, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> I do think its possible, and has actually been done successfully.  The Bible
> is a difficult case since we don't have value free assessments of
> authorship.  Consequently it is reasonable to argue that what the programs
> do is successfully implement the prejudices of their authors.  
> 
> However, when we apply this to Dickens, and then ask whether the various
> completions of Edwin Drood were completed by him, and we apply it to Jane
> Austen and ask whether the software shows the same person to have written
> the works of Austen and Fanny Burney, we are dealing with definitely known
> authorship, so we can assume that if the algorithms discriminate correctly
> in these cases they will probably work on other material where authorship is
> unknown.
> 
> The case which I'm looking to apply this to is a bit more like the literary
> case.  There a number of texts of which the authorship is definitely known
> and not subject to dispute.  There is then one text whose authorship is
> unknown.  The question is whether it is probably by one of the known
> authors

The International Association of Forensic Linguistics <http://www.iafl.org> do stuff on disputed authorship.  I recall there was a summer school a couple of years back that had someone on computer assisted authorship analysis.


Best Wishes,

David Glasgow
Carlton Glasgow Partnership

i-psych.co.uk