Pull out all the stops: Textual analysis via punctuation sequences
This work tackles the problem of enhancing stylometric analysis for literary scholars and computational linguists by focusing on an overlooked feature, though it appears incremental as it applies existing methods to a new aspect of text.
The paper investigates whether punctuation sequences alone can serve as a distinctive feature for author identification, genre classification, and tracking stylistic evolution over time in literary texts, addressing a gap in stylometry.
Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in "stylometry", the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?