Abstracts for Literary and Linguistic Computing
Volume 11, Number 3



TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. D.I. Holmes and S. Singh, "A Stylometric Analysis of Conversational Speech of Aphasic Patients"
  2. H. Baayen, F. Tweedie and H. van Halteren, "Outside the Cave of Shadows: Using Syntactic Annotation to Enhance Authorship Attribution"
  3. C. Martindale and P. Tuffin, "If Homer is the Poet of the _Iliad_, then He is Not the Poet of the _Odyssey_"
  4. Y.S. Han, H. R. Park, J. H. Shin and K-S Choi, "An Upper Bound Estimate for the Entropy of Korean Texts"

ABSTRACTS

D.I. Holmes and S. Singh
"A Stylometric Analysis of Conversational Speech of Aphasic Patients"

In general, existing lexical tests carried out in speech therapy clinics deal with the ability to recognize written words and to name pictures of objects. Such tests assess abilities which are distinct from those required in spontaneous conversation and therefore cannot predict on their own what a patient is capable of in a communicative context. This paper aims to devise a method of statistically assessing an individual patient's lexical ability in spontaneous conversation so as to provide an instrument which will be of use to speech therapists in a clinical situation and which may suggest ways of tackling lexical deficit.

H. Baayen, F. Tweedie and H. van Halteren
"Outside the Cave of Shadows: Using Syntactic Annotation to Enhance Authorship Attribution"

This paper reports an experiment in authorship attribution in which statistical measures and methods that have been widely applied to words and their frequencies of use are applied to rewrite rules as they appear in a syntactically annotated corpus. The outcome of this experiment suggests that the frequencies with which syntactic rewrite rules are put to use provide a better clue to authorship than word usage. Complementary methods focusing on the high-frequency head and the low-frequency tail of the distribution independently reveal a higher resolution than traditional word-based analyses, and promise enhanced accuracy for authorship attribution.

C. Martindale and P. Tuffin
"If Homer is the Poet of the _Iliad_, then He is Not the Poet of the _Odyssey_"

The pattern of usage of frequent and infrequent words in the Iliad and the Odyssey was examined. Discriminant analyses indicated highly significant differences between the two poems. In contrast, word usage in early and late plays by Sophocles does not differ. This makes it unlikely that the Iliad and Odyssey are early and late works by the same author. Word usage in poems with very different subject matter ascribed to Hesiod does not differ. This makes it unlikely that differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey can be attributed to the differing subject matter of the two poems. Further support for the contention that the Iliad and Odyssey are the works of different poets comes from the finding that word usage in the two poems is much more different than word usage in plays known to be by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Discriminant analyses of putatively early and late segments of the Iliad and Odyssey generally yielded insignificant results, thus implying that each could well be the work of a single poet.

Y. S. Han, H. R. Park, J. H. Shin and K-S Choi
"An Upper Bound Estimate for the Entropy of Korean Texts"

The entropy of printed languages suggests how predictable the language usages are and how efficiently the printed texts can be handled in text processing. In this paper, for the first time we present an upper bound estimate of the entropy for printed Korean. We obtained 6.01 bits for each Korean syllable. The method to compute the entropy makes use of a stochastic language model for Korean whose probabilistic parameters are estimated from a sample of 5.5 million word-phrases. The stochastic model was designed to best utilize the structure of Korean. An entropy estimate is computed by running the stochastic model on a sample of 1.45 million units that is carefully arranged to represent a wide range of printed Korean styles.


The full text of the articles to which these abstracts refer will be published in Literary & Linguistic Computing, Vol 11, No 3, which is due to be published in August 1996. If you would like further details about the journal, including details of subscription rates, please contact:

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