Classification of literary style that takes order into consideration.

Abstract

The statistical analysis of the heterogeneity of the style of a text often leads to the analysis of contingency tables of ordered rows. When multiple authorship is suspected, one can explore that heterogeneity through either a change-point analysis of these rows, consistent with sudden changes of author, or a cluster analysis of them, consistent with authors contributing exchangeably, without taking order into consideration. Here an analysis is proposed that strikes a compromise between change-point and cluster analysis by incorporating the fact that parts close together are more likely to belong to the same author than parts far apart. The approach is illustrated by revisiting the authorship attribution of Tirant lo Blanc