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. We do also have a case like the Biblical case - where there are texts under one signature that we suspect to have come from more than one author, and perhaps from the author of the text of primary interest. It would be nice to be able to discriminate between authors in this body of work as well. Thanks for the very helpful references. Its early days yet, but there is no reason why statistical analysis should not illuminate this question, and there are some promising leads. Certainty is not to be expected, but statistical text analysis is definitely one weapon in the armory. I've no views on Paul and Hebrews. Whether an author really does write in statistically different ways depending on audience, well, its an empirical question, haven't come across any studies. Yes, the working assumption in the stats is that they don't. One could probably tell by looking at the work of some prolific authors who have published in different segments under different names. There are such cases. -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/Re-Text-analysis-and-author-anyone-done-it-tp3636729p3637660.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
