Modeling the Transmission of al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Ḥikam in Medieval Europe: Some Initial Data-Driven Explorations

This article addresses the transmission of a mid-eleventh century Arabic compilation of Hellenic wisdom, al-Mubashshir Ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-Ḥikam wa-maḥāsin al-kalim, into medieval European languages. It documents new archival evidence for the scope of this textual tradition. The combination of digital textual and archival evidence provides important clues for building hypotheses for an expanded reception history of the Arabic text in Europe. Using corpora built in three languages—Castilian, Latin and French—it leverages stylometric analysis to explore the discursive communities in which the translations may have emerged and where they took on new meanings. The article puts medium-scale stylometry into practice in the field of comparative literature and translation studies for the exploration of large text collections, and suggests how quantitative methods could be deployed in translingual corpus-level literary research. It also argues for the use of stylometry at early stages of literary historical research to discover new paths of inquiry

Plotting Poetry: On mechanically enhanced reading, 5–7 October 2017, Basel, Switzerland

Plotting Poetry: On mechanically enhanced reading, 5–7 October 2017, Basel, Switzerlan

Machine learning for ancient languages: a survey

Ancient languages preserve the cultures and histories of the past. However, their study is fraught with difficulties, and experts must tackle a range of challenging text-based tasks, from deciphering lost languages to restoring damaged inscriptions, to determining the authorship of works of literature. Technological aids have long supported the study of ancient texts, but in recent years advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled analyses on a scale and in a detail that are reshaping the field of humanities, similarly to how microscopes and telescopes have contributed to the realm of science. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey of published research using machine learning for the study of ancient texts written in any language, script, and medium, spanning over three and a half millennia of civilizations around the ancient world. To analyze the relevant literature, we introduce a taxonomy of tasks inspired by the steps involved in the study of ancient documents: digitization, restoration, attribution, linguistic analysis, textual criticism, translation, and decipherment. This work offers three major contributions: first, mapping the interdisciplinary field carved out by the synergy between the humanities and machine learning; second, highlighting how active collaboration between specialists from both fields is key to producing impactful and compelling scholarship; third, highlighting promising directions for future work in this field. Thus, this work promotes and supports the continued collaborative impetus between the humanities and machine learning

A Stylometric Analysis of Climate Change Fiction

This work sets out to analyze stylistic changes in Anthropocene fiction over the past 60 years. The starting point for the analysis has been Rachel Carson, and the presumed beginning of the Anthropocene in the 1960s. The primary insight gained reveals the connections within these novel and relations of similar writing about climate change thereby contributing to the field of Environmental Humanities in a fundamental way, as so far, climate change fiction has only been investigated through a topic centered focus. The corpus compiled for scrutiny here extends to over 84 novels from these years. These novels have been selected based on a dual approach, looking at the secondary literature as well as a crowdsourced approach in looking at Good Reads’ cli-fi lists. The resulting texts are then analyzed with stylo, an R package that has been specifically created for stylometric analysis by humanists. The results are visualized in a network that allows easier interpretation and leads to an understanding of more detailed questions about the nature of the connection between works, the inspiration and representation of a specific genre of writing. Moreover, the thesis looks diachronically at clustering based on time and topic. Understanding the ways in which authors address and have addressed climate change is one indicator of how climate change is and has been comprehended. In terms of the digital approach applied here, the basis is a distant reading approach covering a larger number of novels and rather than close reading them, the task is to find patterns that extend throughout. However, for a thorough analysis, scalable reading is applied to contextualize and investigate the results in more depth. Overall, the results are meant to establish a baseline for discussing climate change fiction in the Anthropocene which although gaining more scholarly attention still is understudied. The hope is to not only gain insight but to generate visualizations that will provide a helpful resource for fellow scholars

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Atribuição de autoria em micro-mensagens

Orientadores: Ariadne Maria Brito Rizzoni Carvalho, Anderson de Rezende RochaDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Matemática Estatística e Computação CientíficaResumo: Com o crescimento continuo do uso de midias sociais, a atribuição de autoria tem um papel imortante na prevenção dos crimes cibernéticos e na análise de rastros online deixados por assediadores, \textit{bullies}, ladrões de identidade entre outros. Nesta dissertação, nós propusemos um método para atribuição de autoria que é de cem a mil vezes mais rápido que o estado da arte. Nós também obtivemos uma acurácia 65\% na classificação de 50 autores. O método proposto se baseia numa representação de caracteristicas escalável utilizando os padrões das mensagens dos micro-blogs, e também nos utilizamos de um classificador de padrões customizado para lidar com grandes quantidades de dados e alta dimensionalidade. Por fim, nós discutimos a redução do espaço de busca na análise de centenas de suspeitos online e milões de micro mensagens online, o que torna essa abordagem valiosa para forense digital e aplicação das leisAbstract: With the ever-growing use of social media, authorship attribution plays an important role in avoiding cybercrime, and helping the analysis of online trails left behind by cyber pranks, stalkers, bullies, identity thieves and alike. In this dissertation, we propose a method for authorship attribution in micro blogs with efficiency one hundred to a thousand times faster than state-of-the-art counterparts. We also achieved a accuracy of 65% when classifying texts from 50 authors. The method relies on a powerful and scalable feature representation approach taking advantage of user patterns on micro-blog messages, and also on a custom-tailored pattern classifier adapted to deal with big data and high-dimensional data. Finally, we discuss search space reduction when analysing hundreds of online suspects and millions of online micro messages, which makes this approach invaluable for digital forensics and law enforcementMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Overview of PAN'17: Author Identification, Author Profiling, and Author Obfuscation

[EN] The PAN 2017 shared tasks on digital text forensics were held in conjunction with the annual CLEF conference. This paper gives a high-level overview of each of the three shared tasks organized this year, namely author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation. For each task, we give a brief summary of the evaluation data, performance measures, and results obtained. Altogether, 29 participants submitted a total of 33 pieces of software for evaluation, whereas 4 participants submitted to more than one task. All submitted software has been deployed to the TIRA evaluation platform, where it remains hosted for reproducibility purposes.The work at the Universitat Politècnica de València was funded by the MINECO research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P).Potthast, M.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Tschuggnall, M.; Stamatatos, E.; Rosso, P.; Stein, B. (2017). Overview of PAN'17: Author Identification, Author Profiling, and Author Obfuscation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 10456:275-290. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65813-1_25S27529010456Amigó, E., Gonzalo, J., Artiles, J., Verdejo, F.: A comparison of extrinsic clustering evaluation metrics based on formal constraints. Inf. Retrieval 12(4), 461–486 (2009)Bagnall, D.: Authorship clustering using multi-headed recurrent neural networks—notebook for PAN at CLEF 2016. In: Balog et al. [3] (2016). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Balog, K., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Macdonald, C. (eds.): CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 5–8 September, Évora, Portugal. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org (2016). http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesClarke, C.L., Craswell, N., Soboroff, I., Voorhees, E.M.: Overview of the TREC 2009 web track. Technical report, DTIC Document (2009)García, Y., Castro, D., Lavielle, V., Noz, R.M.: Discovering author groups using a $$\beta$$ β -compact graph-based clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Glavaš, G., Nanni, F., Ponzetto, S.P.: Unsupervised text segmentation using semantic relatedness graphs. In: Association for Computational Linguistics (2016)Gollub, T., Stein, B., Burrows, S.: Ousting ivory tower research: towards a web framework for providing experiments as a service. In: Hersh, B., Callan, J., Maarek, Y., Sanderson, M. (eds.) 35th International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2012), pp. 1125–1126. ACM, August 2012Gómez-Adorno, H., Aleman, Y., no, D.V., Sanchez-Perez, M.A., Pinto, D., Sidorov, G.: Author clustering using hierarchical clustering analysis. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2017: safety evaluation revisited. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Halvani, O., Graner, L.: Author clustering based on compression-based dissimilarity scores. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hearst, M.A.: TextTiling: segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages. Comput. Linguist. 23(1), 33–64 (1997)Kiros, R., Zhu, Y., Salakhutdinov, R.R., Zemel, R., Urtasun, R., Torralba, A., Fidler, S.: Skip-thought vectors. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 3294–3302 (2015)Kocher, M., Savoy, J.: UniNE at CLEF 2017: author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) CLEF 2017 Working Notes. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Koppel, M., Akiva, N., Dershowitz, I., Dershowitz, N.: Unsupervised decomposition of a document into authorial components. In: Lin, D., Matsumoto, Y., Mihalcea, R. (eds.) Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1356–1364 (2011)Misra, H., Yvon, F., Jose, J.M., Cappe, O.: Text segmentation via topic modeling: an analytical study. In: Proceedings of CIKM 2009, pp. 1553–1556. ACM (2009)Pevzner, L., Hearst, M.A.: A critique and improvement of an evaluation metric for text segmentation. Comput. Linguis. 28(1), 19–36 (2002)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: Notebook Papers of the 5th Evaluation Lab on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse (PAN), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2011Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Stein, B.: Improving the reproducibility of PAN’s shared tasks: plagiarism detection, author identification, and author profiling. In: Kanoulas, E., Lupu, M., Clough, P., Sanderson, M., Hall, M., Hanbury, A., Toms, E. (eds.) CLEF 2014. LNCS, vol. 8685, pp. 268–299. Springer, Cham (2014). doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-11382-1_22Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B.: Author obfuscation: attacking the state of the art in authorship verification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing interaction logs to understand text reuse from the web. In: Fung, P., Poesio, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 13), pp. 1212–1221. Association for Computational Linguistics (2013). http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/p13-1119Rangel, F., Celli, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 8–11 September, Toulouse, France. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Chugur, I., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Halvey, M., Kraaij, W. (eds.) CLEF 2014 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 15–18 September, Sheffield, UK. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, September 2014Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Franco-Salvador, M.: A low dimensionality representation for language variety identification. In: 17th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing. LNCS. Springer (2016). arXiv:1705.10754Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013. In: Forner, P., Navigli, R., Tufis, D. (eds.) CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop – Working Notes Papers, 23–26 September, Valencia, Spain (2013)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th author profiling task at PAN 2017: gender and language variety identification in Twitter. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th author profiling task at PAN 2016: cross-genre evaluations. In: Balog et al. [3]Riedl, M., Biemann, C.: TopicTiling: a text segmentation algorithm based on LDA. In: Proceedings of ACL 2012 Student Research Workshop, pp. 37–42. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)Scaiano, M., Inkpen, D.: Getting more from segmentation evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. pp. 362–366. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)Stamatatos, E., Tschuggnall, M., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Stamatatos, E., Tschuggnall, M., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016Tschuggnall, M., Stamatatos, E., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Specht, G., Stein, B., Potthast, M.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2017: style breach detection and author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 201

Astronomy and Literature | Canon and Stylometrics

This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige

An effective and scalable framework for authorship attribution query processing

© 2018 The Authors. Published by IEEE. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8457490Authorship attribution aims at identifying the original author of an anonymous text from a given set of candidate authors and has a wide range of applications. The main challenge in authorship attribution problem is that the real-world applications tend to have hundreds of authors, while each author may have a small number of text samples, e.g., 5-10 texts/author. As a result, building a predictive model that can accurately identify the author of an anonymous text is a challenging task. In fact, existing authorship attribution solutions based on long text focus on application scenarios, where the number of candidate authors is limited to 50. These solutions generally report a significant performance reduction as the number of authors increases. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel data representation model that captures stylistic variations within each document, which transforms the problem of authorship attribution into a similarity search problem. Based on this data representation model, we also propose a similarity query processing technique that can effectively handle outliers. We assess the accuracy of our proposed method against the state-of-the-art authorship attribution methods using real-world data sets extracted from Project Gutenberg. Our data set contains 3000 novels from 500 authors. Experimental results from this paper show that our method significantly outperforms all competitors. Specifically, as for the closed-set and open-set authorship attribution problems, our method have achieved higher than 95% accuracy.This work was supported by the CityU Project under Grant 7200387 and Grant 6000511.Published versio