SIGIR WORKSHOP REPORT

Future Short Term Goals of Research in Computational Analysis ofStylistics in Text

Shlomo Argamon, Jussi Karlgren and James G. Shanahan

1Introduction

The first workshop on stylistic analysis of text for information access was held on the day
following the 2005 SIGIR conference. This workshop addressed the automatic analysis andextraction of stylistic aspects of natural language texts. Style, roughly defined as the 'manner' inwhich something is expressed, as opposed to the 'content' of a message is usually disregarded byinformation access applications as having no bearing on the target notion of relevance: systems
have typically focused on the "factual" aspect of content analysis.
The goal of improving the textual analysis of information access systems is a motivating factor
for stylistic research. In addition, readers, authors, and information specialists of whatever
persuasion are aware of stylistic variation. This provides us with the added philologicalmotivation for research: that of understanding text, readers, and authors better.
The program for this workshop was tight and full of presentations: this was an exploratory
meeting, with presentations ranging extensively across various examples of non-topical analysisof text. The data sets used, the features extracted, the target dimensions aimed at, and thecomputational schemes employed varied widely, attendant to the impressive variation inapplication.
Speaking generally, taking first steps in stylistic analysis of text is quite easy:

select computable textual features;combine them judiciously;model the choice space;compare results from measurements on texts under consideration to some norm ornorms.

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This is a process which is familiar to any practitioner of information access research. The
challenge, returning to the motivations mentioned above, is to ensure that the analysis has
reliable predictive power for the application under consideration, and that the results haveadequate explanatory altitude to provide purchase for further study and generalization.

2

Evaluation and Application

Evaluation was naturally at the forefront of the presentations. The various application areas
motivated several different approaches to evaluation, from the relatively clear case of authorship
attribution and forensic applications to the less clear cut ones one of mood classification of blog
posts. For any information access application, the evaluation must be both operationallyquantifiable and related to some formalization of user needs --- one of the projects presented
explicitly gathered user opinions for an information retrieval system which utilized stylistic
analysis for presentation of results.

3Feature Rally

The crucial methodological difference between stylistic analysis and topical information retrieval
is that of feature extraction. The features studied are different than those studied in topicalanalysis of text -- in the workshop we addressed this in a Feature Rally session, whereparticipants were invited to present their favourite feature in a few minutes.

4Common Resources

To better synchronize the efforts of resources, the workshop decided to establish a clearinghousefor common resources, a mailing list, and a bibliography of previously published research. Firstand foremost, the proceedings of this first workshop on textual stylistics in information accesswill be made publicly available.
Any interested parties are welcomed to contact the organizers for further information!

5Future Meeting

At the end of the proceedings, the workshop ended with the consensus that future meetings are inorder. A workshop is provisionally planned for the next SIGIR, including a common task forparticipants to provide an embryo of a common evaluation scheme. Anyone interested inparticipation should contact the organizers of this years workshop to find out more!

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