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
