Investigating the Application of Distributional Semantics to Stylometry
Authors: Giulia Benotto, Emiliano Giovannetti, Simone Marchi (CNR-ILC, 2016)
Topic: Textual Genres & Literature Linguistics

Abstract
The inclusion of semantic features in the stylometric analysis of literary texts appears to be poorly investigated. In this work, we experiment with the application of Distributional Semantics to a corpus of Italian literature to test if words distribution can convey stylistic cues. To verify our hypothesis, we have set up an Authorship Attribution experiment. Indeed, the results we have obtained suggest that the style of an author can reveal itself through words distribution too.

Introduction
Stylometry, that is the application of the study of linguistic style, offers a means of capturing the elusive character of an author's style by quantifying some of its features. The basic stylometric assumption is that each writer has certain stylistic idiosyncrasies (a ``human stylome'' AUTHOR) that define their style. Analysis based on stylometry are often used for Authorship Attribution (AA) tasks, since the main idea behind computationally supported AA is that by measuring some textual features, we can distinguish between texts written by different authors AUTHOR. One of the less investigated stylistic feature is the way in which authors use words from a semantic point of view, e.g. if they tend to use more, when dealing with polysemous words, a certain sense over the others, or senses that differ (even slightly) from the one that's more commonly used (as it happens, typically, in poetry). A possible approach to the analysis of this characteristic is to consider the textual contexts in which certain words appear. According to Distributional Semantics (DS), certain aspects of the meaning of lexical expressions depend on the distributional properties of such expressions, or better, on the contexts in which they are observed AUTHOR. The semantic properties of a word can then be defined by inspecting a significant number of linguistic contexts, representative of the distributional behavior of such word. In this work we would like to investigate if the analysis of the distribution of words in a text can be exploited to provide a stylistic cue. In order to inspect that, we have experimented with the application of DS to the stylometric analysis of literary texts belonging to a corpus constituted by texts pertaining to the work of six Italian writers of the late nineteenth century. In the following, Section 2 gives a short insight on the state of the art of computational stylistic analysis, Section 3 describes the approach together with the corpus used to conduct our investigation and Section 4 discuss about results. Finally, Section 5 draws some conclusions and outlines some possible future works.

Conclusion
In this paper we investigated the possibility that an analysis of the semantic distribution of words in a text can be potentially exploited to get cues about the style of an author. In order to validate our hypothesis, we conducted a first experiment on six different Italian authors. The results seem to suggest that the way words are distributed across a text, can provide a valid stylistic cue to distinguish an author's work. Of course, it is not our intent, with this paper, to define new methods for enhancing state-of-the-art authorship attribution algorithms. Our research will focus, in the next steps, in detecting and providing useful indications about the style of an author. This can be done by highlighting, for example, atypical distributions of words (e.g. with contrastive methods) or by analysing their distributional variability. Furthermore, it could be interesting to use a different distributional measure, than the cosine, to test our hypothesis.