The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0727  Friday, 30 March 2001

From:           Paul Maddox <
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Date:           Saturday, 24 Mar 2001 22:34:44 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: 12.0699 Re: Shakespearean Authorship Research
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.0699 Re: Shakespearean Authorship Research

Gabriel Egan wrote:

> "Noun" and "singular" I understand, but what do "NN" and "mass" denote
> regarding the word "dog"? (Sorry if this is standard stylometric
> terminology--hopefully my ignorance is shared by others on the list so
> an answer will be worth distributing.)

"NN" is just the shorthand for the linguistic tag. Just as a dictionary
will have 'n' (noun), 'v' (verb), etc, for linguistic tags. Because the
tagger I use breaks down language much further, there has to be more
tags. I read the meanings of the tags from:
http://www.clg.bham.ac.uk/tagger/tagset.html.

> Lost me, I'm afraid. What aspects of the two documents are being
> compared?  Assuming both are in ASCII coding, they are similar in not
> containing Persian letter forms, but that doesn't tell us much. Could
> you state the nature of the comparisons you are making?

In the simplest case, my program will count the number of, for instance,
nouns in a certain document. It will then compare the number of nouns
with the number of nouns in other files.

So, for instance:

       Doc 1     Doc 2       Comp |x1-x2|
------------------------------------------
Nouns   5         3           2

My program would not be very accurate if it could only take into
consideration one tag at a time, hence my comparison method takes into
account all 40-ish tags.

All the best,
Paul

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