Syllabic quantity patterns as rhythmic features for Latin authorship attribution

It is well known that, within the Latin production of written text, peculiar metric schemes were followed not only in poetic compositions, but also in many prose works. Such metric patterns were based on so-called syllabic quantity, that is, on the length of the involved syllables, and there is substantial evidence suggesting that certain authors had a preference for certain metric patterns over others. In this research we investigate the possibility to employ syllabic quantity as a base for deriving rhythmic features for the task of computational authorship attribution of Latin prose texts. We test the impact of these features on the authorship attribution task when combined with other topic-agnostic features. Our experiments, carried out on three different datasets using support vector machines (SVMs) show that rhythmic features based on syllabic quantity are beneficial in discriminating among Latin prose authors

The authorship of the Historia Augusta:Two new computer studies

The Historia Augusta is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors stretching from Hadrian(117-138) to Carus (282-83) and his son Carinus (283-285). The lives purport to be written by six different authors, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus, working under the Emperors Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine (306-337). For much of the period it covers, the HA represents the only extended narrative source, and the testimony it offers is invaluable. Unfortunately, the HA is also famous for its bizarre details and puzzling omissions, its lurid focus on emperors’ peccadilloes and personal habits to the detriment of their political accomplishments. It also notoriously includes documents – speeches, letters, laws– which are almost certainly fabricated, and cites a whole host of authors nowhere else attested and which are probably invented. But the problem of the HA is not only its unreliability as an historical text: it also includes throughout troubling anachronisms, mentions of office and titles that only came into being in the middle of the fourth century, decades after the supposed date of its composition. In 1889, Hermann Dessau put forth the provocative thesis that the HA was in fact the work of a single author working under the reign of Theodosius (379-395), and that division of the lives between six authors and their dedications to Diocletian and Constantine were merely a literary ploy. Ronald Syme – the most influential exponent of the Dessau thesis – would famously term the author ‘a rogue grammaticus.

Authenticating the writings of Julius Caesar

In this paper, we shed new light on the authenticity of the Corpus Caesarianum, a group of five commentaries describing the campaigns of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), the founder of the Roman empire. While Caesar himself has authored at least part of these commentaries, the authorship of the rest of the texts remains a puzzle that has persisted for nineteen centuries. In particular, the role of Caesar’s general Aulus Hirtius, who has claimed a role in shaping the corpus, has remained in contention. Determining the authorship of documents is an increasingly important authentication problem in information and computer science, with valuable applications, ranging from the domain of art history to counter-terrorism research. We describe two state-of-the-art authorship verification systems and benchmark them on 6 present-day evaluation corpora, as well as a Latin benchmark dataset. Regarding Caesar’s writings, our analyses allow us to establish that Hirtius’s claims to part of the corpus must be considered legitimate. We thus demonstrate how computational methods constitute a valuable methodological complement to traditional, expert-based approaches to document authentication

One-Class Classification: Taxonomy of Study and Review of Techniques

One-class classification (OCC) algorithms aim to build classification models when the negative class is either absent, poorly sampled or not well defined. This unique situation constrains the learning of efficient classifiers by defining class boundary just with the knowledge of positive class. The OCC problem has been considered and applied under many research themes, such as outlier/novelty detection and concept learning. In this paper we present a unified view of the general problem of OCC by presenting a taxonomy of study for OCC problems, which is based on the availability of training data, algorithms used and the application domains applied. We further delve into each of the categories of the proposed taxonomy and present a comprehensive literature review of the OCC algorithms, techniques and methodologies with a focus on their significance, limitations and applications. We conclude our paper by discussing some open research problems in the field of OCC and present our vision for future research.Comment: 24 pages + 11 pages of references, 8 figure