Pull out all the stops: Textual analysis via punctuation sequences

Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in ``stylometry'', the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?

[1]  T C Mendenhall,et al.  THE CHARACTERISTIC CURVES OF COMPOSITION. , 1887, Science.

[2]  R. A. Leibler,et al.  On Information and Sufficiency , 1951 .

[3]  E. Partridge.  Notes on punctuation , 1963 .

[4]  F. Mosteller,et al.  Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist , 1966 .

[5]  F. G. Fowler,et al.  The King's English , 1979 .

[6]  N. Mundhenk.  Punctuation , 1981, The Integrated Leader.

[7]  C. Pollard,et al.  Center for the Study of Language and Information , 2022 .

[8]  V. Caron,et al.  United states. , 2018, Nursing standard (Royal College of Nursing (Great Britain) : 1987).

[9]  Geoffrey Nunberg,et al.  The linguistics of punctuation , 1990 .

[10]  Thomas M. Cover,et al.  Elements of Information Theory , 2005 .

[11]  Jianhua Lin,et al.  Divergence measures based on the Shannon entropy , 1991, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[12]  W. Ebeling,et al.  Entropy and Long-Range Correlations in Literary English , 1993, cond-mat/0204108.

[13]  B. Kjell,et al.  Authorship attribution of text samples using neural networks and Bayesian classifiers , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[14]  Cynthia Whissell,et al.  Traditional and emotional stylometric analysis of the songs of Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon , 1996, Comput. Humanit..

[15]  Hinrich Schütze,et al.  Automatic Detection of Text Genre , 1997, ACL.

[16]  D. Holmes.  The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship , 1998 .

[17]  R. Forsyth.  Stylochronometry with substrings, or : a poet young and old , 1999 .

[18]  Carole E. Chaski,et al.  Empirical evaluations of language-based author identification techniques , 2001 .

[19]  Shigeo Abe DrEng.  Pattern Classification , 2001, Springer London.

[20]  MacD. P. Jackson.  Pause Patterns in Shakespeare's Verse: Canon and Chronology , 2002, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[21]  Huey-Wen Yien,et al.  Information categorization approach to literary authorship disputes , 2003 .

[22]  Marina Santini.  A Shallow Approach To Syntactic Feature Extraction For Genre Classification , 2003 .

[23]  H. Hughes.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , 2003 .

[24]  John Lennon,et al.  Traditional and Emotional Stylometric Analysis of the Songs of Beatles , 2004 .

[25]  Fazli Can,et al.  Change of Writing Style with Time , 2004, Comput. Humanit..

[26]  Vladimiro Sassone,et al.  Mathematical Structures in Computer Science vol. 14(3). Special issue on Concurrency and Coordination , 2004 .

[27]  Sang Joon Kim,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Communication , 2006 .

[28]  Justin Zobel,et al.  Using Relative Entropy for Authorship Attribution , 2006, AIRS.

[29]  Carl James,et al.  Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Lynne Truss: Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: or why can’t anybody spell?. Vivian James , 2006 .

[30]  Jonathon Shlens.  Notes on Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Likelihood , 2014, ArXiv.

[31]  Jack Grieve,et al.  Quantitative Authorship Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques , 2007, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[32]  Constantina Stamou,et al.  Stylochronometry: Stylistic Development, Sequence of Composition, and Relative Dating , 2007, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[33]  C. E. Veni Madhavan,et al.  Stopword Graphs and Authorship Attribution in Text Corpora , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing.

[34]  Efstathios Stamatatos,et al.  A survey of modern authorship attribution methods , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[35]  J. M. Hughes,et al.  Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[36]  Terry Lyons.  Rough paths, Signatures and the modelling of functions on streams , 2014, 1405.4537.

[37]  Eduardo G. Altmann,et al.  On the similarity of symbol frequency distributions with heavy tails , 2015, ArXiv.

[38]  Charles O. Hartman.  Verse: An Introduction to Prosody , 2015 .

[39]  Yifan Ge,et al.  Classification of Book Genres By Cover and Title , 2015 .

[40]  Jun Zhao,et al.  Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification , 2015, AAAI.

[41]  Critical Behavior from Deep Dynamics: A Hidden Dimension in Natural Language , 2016, ArXiv.

[42]  Eduardo G. Altmann,et al.  Generalized entropies and the similarity of texts , 2016, ArXiv.

[43]  M. Parkes.  Pause and Effect : An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West , 2016 .

[44]  Andrey Kormilitzin,et al.  A Primer on the Signature Method in Machine Learning , 2016, ArXiv.

[45]  Ting He,et al.  Deep Learning based Authorship Identification , 2017 .

[46]  Renio S. Mendes,et al.  Robustness of sentence length measures in written texts , 2018, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

[47]  Yiming Yan,et al.  Surveying Stylometry Techniques and Applications , 2017, ACM Comput. Surv..

[48]  Leonard Neidorf,et al.  Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition , 2019, Nature Human Behaviour.

[49]  Martin Gerlach,et al.  A Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus for Statistical Analysis of Natural Language and Quantitative Linguistics , 2018, Entropy.