Browsing by Author "Ribeiro, Alejandro"

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    Attributing the Authorship of the Henry VI Plays by Word Adjacency
    (2016-04-01) Egan, Gabriel; Segarra, Santiago; Eisen, Mark; Ribeiro, Alejandro
    This article reports the invention of a new means of authorship attribution based on the relative distances (measured in intervening words) between functions words in the texts being analysed. The data about distances are stored in Markov chains (with each function word represented as a node and the summed distance between a pair of words being represented as a weighted edge between their respective nodes) called Word Adjacency Networks (WANs). The method is applied to the problem of determining the authorship of the three plays called Henry VI Parts One, Two, and Three that are traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare, and we find that Christopher Marlowe had a hand in each of them.
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    How the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) algorithm works
    (Oxford University Press, 2021) Brown, Paul; Eisen, Mark; Segarra, Santiago; Ribeiro, Alejandro; Egan, Gabriel
    This essay will describe the algorithm underlying a new method of computational authorship attribution, the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method, and introduce an Open Source implementation of this algorithm as a Python script freely available for any investigator to experiment with. A mathematically rigorous description of the WAN method and accounts of its application to various problems in authorship attribution have been provided in a series of previous publications (Segarra, Eisen & Ribeiro 2015; Segarra et al. 2016; Eisen et al. 2018), and the specific purpose here is to offer a relatively non-technical account of the underlying algorithm in order to help dispel misconceptions about it and encourage its use by other investigators.
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    'I would I had that corporal soundness': Pervez Rizvi's analysis of the Word Adjacency Network method of authorship attribution
    (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2023) Egan, Gabriel; Eisen, Mark; Segarra, Santiago; Ribeiro, Alejandro
    In his two-part article "An Analysis of the Word Adjacency Network Method" (Rizvi 2022a; Rizvi 2022b), Pervez Rizvi attempts to replicate the Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method for authorship attribution and show that it does not produce the new knowledge that we, its inventors, claim for it. In the present essay we will show that Rizvi misrepresents fundamental aspects of the WAN method, that his attempted replication fails not because the method is flawed but because he erred in replicating it, and that Rizvi misunderstands key aspects of the mathematics of Information Theory that the method uses
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    A response to Pervez Rizvi's critique of the Word Adjacency Method for authorship attribution
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019-03-24) Egan, Gabriel; Segarra, Santiago; Eisen, Mark; Ribeiro, Alejandro
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    A response to Rosalind Barber's Critique of the Word Adjacency Method for Authorship Attribution
    (Taylor and Francis, 2020-01-21) Segarra, Santiago; Eisen, Mark; Egan, Gabriel; Ribeiro, Alejandro
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    Stylometric analysis of Early Modern English plays
    (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2017-12-08) Egan, Gabriel; Segarra, Santiago; Eisen, Mark; Ribeiro, Alejandro
    Function word adjacency networks (WANs) are used to study the authorship of plays from the Early Modern English period. In these networks, nodes are function words and directed edges between two nodes represent the likelihood of ordered co-appearance of the two words. For every analyzed play a WAN is constructed and these are aggregated to generate author profile networks. We first study the similarity of writing styles between Early English playwrights by comparing the profile WANs. The accuracy of using WANs for authorship attribution is then demonstrated by attributing known plays among six popular playwrights. The WAN method is shown to additionally outperform other frequency-based methods on attributing Early English plays. This high classification power is then used to investigate the authorship of anonymous plays. Moreover, WANs are shown to be reliable classifiers even when attributing collaborative plays. For several plays of disputed coauthorship, a deeper analysis is performed by attributing every act and scene separately, in which we both corroborate existing breakdowns and provide evidence of new assignments. Finally, the impact of genre on attribution accuracy is examined revealing that the genre of a play partially conditions the choice of the function words used in it.