Re: VMs: Gordon Rugg's study follow ups

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Grant wrote:

> This  raises an interesting  question: is there a good way to measure 
> the similarity of texts objectively?
>
> (I realize that calculation of entropy is one such test, but a broad one 
> to be sure.)

	Way too broad, I think.

> I have seen a couple of books which applied "stylometric" techniques to 
> New Testament Greek texts, for example, by comparing the relative 
> frequencies of synonyms, but these techniques don't appear too useful 
> for a text whose meaning is unknown.

	Yes, about 40 years ago I saw article on that, in our 
favorite publication in fact!  The article said that not all 
of Paul's letters in the New Testament are in fact by Paul, 
something now accepted by the majority of scholars.  I also 
saw a book, *Trouble Enough*, doing the same thing on the 
Book of Mormon.  I think the algorithm counted common words 
like "the", "and", various prepositions, etc.  I believe 
this is also what the New Testament studies did.  The 
*Trouble Enough* study showed that the books of the Book of 
Mormon were not by several authors.  So these methods 
compare texts within a corpus and could help establish the 
difference between A and B, but I don't know what else they 
could do.

	Most recently, the SHAXICON style checker showed that 
Newsweek staffer Joe Klein wrote the Clinton-era *roman a` 
clef* "Primary Colors".  I've also seen a style checker used 
to identify a notorious troll on USENET. I don't know how 
these programs work.  Jim Gillogly mentioned SHAXICON on the 
list a long time ago, so perhaps he does.

	Gabriel compared the Zipf's Law curves of known Latin texts 
by different authors, and due to that wondered whether A and 
B are as different as we think.  So that's something else to 
consider.

	There is the chi-squared test, of course.  Jacques has 
mentioned the phi-squared test from time to time and said 
that phi-squared tests not just the significance of an 
observed difference between two sample data sets but also 
the magnitude of the difference.  That sounds like the best 
thing of all.

Dennis




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