Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

Artificial Sequences and Complexity Measures

In this paper we exploit concepts of information theory to address the fundamental problem of identifying and defining the most suitable tools to extract, in a automatic and agnostic way, information from a generic string of characters. We introduce in particular a class of methods which use in a crucial way data compression techniques in order to define a measure of remoteness and distance between pairs of sequences of characters (e.g. texts) based on their relative information content. We also discuss in detail how specific features of data compression techniques could be used to introduce the notion of dictionary of a given sequence and of Artificial Text and we show how these new tools can be used for information extraction purposes. We point out the versatility and generality of our method that applies to any kind of corpora of character strings independently of the type of coding behind them. We consider as a case study linguistic motivated problems and we present results for automatic language recognition, authorship attribution and self consistent-classification.Comment: Revised version, with major changes, of previous "Data Compression approach to Information Extraction and Classification" by A. Baronchelli and V. Loreto. 15 pages; 5 figure

Conditional Complexity of Compression for Authorship Attribution

We introduce new stylometry tools based on the sliced conditional compression complexity of literary texts which are inspired by the nearly optimal application of the incomputable Kolmogorov conditional complexity (and presumably approximates it). Whereas other stylometry tools can occasionally be very close for different authors, our statistic is apparently strictly minimal for the true author, if the query and training texts are sufficiently large, compressor is sufficiently good and sampling bias is avoided (as in the poll samplings). We tune it and test its performance on attributing the Federalist papers (Madison vs. Hamilton). Our results confirm the previous attribution of Federalist papers by Mosteller and Wallace (1964) to Madison using the Naive Bayes classifier and the same attribution based on alternative classifiers such as SVM, and the second order Markov model of language. Then we apply our method for studying the attribution of the early poems from the Shakespeare Canon and the continuation of Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero and Leander’ ascribed to G. Chapman.compression complexity, authorship attribution.

Identifying modular flows on multilayer networks reveals highly overlapping organization in social systems

Unveiling the community structure of networks is a powerful methodology to comprehend interconnected systems across the social and natural sciences. To identify different types of functional modules in interaction data aggregated in a single network layer, researchers have developed many powerful methods. For example, flow-based methods have proven useful for identifying modular dynamics in weighted and directed networks that capture constraints on flow in the systems they represent. However, many networked systems consist of agents or components that exhibit multiple layers of interactions. Inevitably, representing this intricate network of networks as a single aggregated network leads to information loss and may obscure the actual organization. Here we propose a method based on compression of network flows that can identify modular flows in non-aggregated multilayer networks. Our numerical experiments on synthetic networks show that the method can accurately identify modules that cannot be identified in aggregated networks or by analyzing the layers separately. We capitalize on our findings and reveal the community structure of two multilayer collaboration networks: scientists affiliated to the Pierre Auger Observatory and scientists publishing works on networks on the arXiv. Compared to conventional aggregated methods, the multilayer method reveals smaller modules with more overlap that better capture the actual organization

Language Trees and Zipping

In this letter we present a very general method to extract information from a generic string of characters, e.g. a text, a DNA sequence or a time series. Based on data-compression techniques, its key point is the computation of a suitable measure of the remoteness of two bodies of knowledge. We present the implementation of the method to linguistic motivated problems, featuring highly accurate results for language recognition, authorship attribution and language classification.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX4, 1 eps figure. In press in Phys. Rev. Lett. (January 2002