Hao Sun | Authorship Attribution of Yasunari Kawabata’s Novel Snow Country
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2019-05-30

Hao Sun | Doshisha University, Japan

This study applies computational stylistics methods for authorship attribution to give light on authorship problem of Snow Country. Snow Country is a novel published under the name of Yasunari Kawabata but suspected to be ghostwritten by Yukio Mishima. Yasunari Kawabata, the author of Snow Country was one of the most famous novelists in Japanese literature history. His novels became world-famous after he received the Novel Prize in Literature in 1968. Our method for attributing the author of Snow Country consists of three steps: establishing a training text corpus, extracting necessary stylometric features, and applying proper machine learning algorithms. Firstly, we established a corpus which contains 20 novels of both Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. The goal of establish the corpus is to providing training data corpus for authorship attribution. Secondly, we employed comma position, part-of-speech(POS) tag bi-grams, and particle bi-grams as stylometric features to convert the writing style into numeric vectors. All the stylometric features mentioned above have been proved effective in Japanese authorship attribution. Finally, correspondence analysis(CA), hierarchical clustering analysis(HCA), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), high-dimensional discriminant analysis (HDDA), logic model tree (LMT), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM) are performed to attribute the real author of Snow Country. The quantitative analytical results revealed that the writing style of Snow Country is much more close to Yasunari Kawabata rather than Yukio Mishima. The results provided strong evidence to suggest that Snow Country was not written by the ghostwriter Yukio Mishima.

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