Can analysis of word frequency distinguish between writings of different authors?

Baruch Vilensky

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 1996, vol. 231, issue 4, 705-711

Abstract: Various literature writings are compared by the “rank distance”, d, between two word frequency Zipf plots introduced by S. Havlin (Physica A 216 (1995) 148). We studied 22 books written by six authors. For this ensemble of books we find that the mean distance between books written by the same authors (〈d〉 = 15.2 ± 2.6) is considerably smaller than that between books written by different authors (〈d〉 = 21.8 ± 3.2), in good agreement with earlier results on a smaller sample of books. Our results suggest that the distribution of the rank difference of the same words in different books decays exponentially.

Date: 1996
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:231:y:1996:i:4:p:705-711

DOI: 10.1016/0378-4371(96)00109-4

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