[Corpora-List] New Book: Literary Detective Work on the Computer, by Michael P. Oakes

[Oakes, Michael]

new book information

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

www.benjamins.com

[NLP
12]

Computational & corpus linguistics / Natural language processing

Literary Detective Work on the Computer

Michael P. Oakes

University of Wolverhampton

Computational linguistics can be used to uncover mysteries in text which are not
always obvious to visual inspection. For example, the computer analysis of writing
style can show who might be the true author of a text in cases of disputed authorship
or suspected plagiarism. The theoretical background to authorship attribution is
presented in a step by step manner, and comprehensive reviews of the field are given in
two specialist areas, the writings of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and
the various writing styles seen in religious texts. The final chapter looks at the progress
computers have made in the decipherment of lost languages. This book is written for
students and researchers of general linguistics, computational and corpus linguistics,
and computer forensics. It will inspire future researchers to study these topics for
themselves, and gives sufficient details of the methods and resources to get them started.

[Natural Language Processing, 12] 2014. x, 283 pp.

Hb 978 90 272 4999 9 EUR 99.00

E-book 978 90 272 7013 9 EUR 99.00

Table of contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Author identification

Chapter 2. Plagiarism and spam filtering

Chapter 3. Computer studies of
Shakespearean authorship

Chapter 4. Stylometric analysis
of religious texts

Chapter 5. Computers and decipherment

References

Index

"Interesting, packed and wide-ranging."

Prof. Ward E.Y. Elliott, Claremont McKenna College

"This book will prove a valuable resource for anyone wishing to gain a working knowledge of the methods
and achievements of computational stylometry. It covers a wide range of studies in the field, explaining
the main results and the techniques used to find them in an accessible manner. A strong point is that
it includes a number of worked examples showing, with the aid of small-scale data sets, how some
of the more important quantitative methods can be implemented. A further strength is its use of the
public-domain system R to illustrate how certain important ideas could be put into practice.

Both newcomers and experienced bardographers will find much of interest in Chapter 3, which gives a
dispassionate, empirically grounded overview of a number of key studies of the authorship of the Shakespearean
canon. It also includes a clear step-by-step exposition of how Bayes's Rule may be used in investigations
of this kind. Chapter 5, on decipherment, contains fascinating accounts of the attempts to decipher the
Rongorongo glyphs of Rapanui (Easter Island) and the ancient seals of the lost Indus Valley civilization, among
others -- introducing the basic notions of Information Theory and Markov modelling as it does so."

Dr. Richard S. Forsyth, Freelance researcher

"In my view this is an excellent and much-missed overview of, and introduction to, the use of statistical tests, methods
and approaches to language decipherment and recognition. The in-depth discussions of the methods employed in
the so-far unsuccessful decipherment of Rongorongo and the Indus Valley texts is an especially engaging read."

Dr. Jarle Ebeling, University of Oslo

"The chapter, illustrated with several examples of problems in New Testament Studies, will
provide a good introduction and overview of the subject area, targeted at computer scientists
who are specialists neither in statistics nor in biblical studies. The emphasis on the methods of
multivariate statistical analysis, such as correspondence analysis, is a welcome feature."

Very Rev. Dr. Andris Abakuks, Birkbeck College

"Very comprehensive and easy to read."

Dr. Paul D. Clough, University of Sheffield





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