Notes on Coalgebras in Stylometry
This work addresses the need for quantitative stylometric analysis, but it appears incremental as it applies existing coalgebraic methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of objectively measuring syntactic behavior variation in texts for stylometry by formalizing behavior using coalgebras embedded into probabilistic transition systems and introducing a behavioral distance to quantitatively compare text features, with the result that this distance can be approximated by a polynomial-time algorithm.
The syntactic behaviour of texts can highly vary depending on their contexts (e.g. author, genre, etc.). From the standpoint of stylometry, it can be helpful to objectively measure this behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how coalgebras are used to formalise the notion of behaviour by embedding syntactic features of a given text into probabilistic transition systems. By introducing the behavioural distance, we are then able to quantitatively measure differences between points in these systems and thus, comparing features of different texts. Furthermore, the behavioural distance of points can be approximated by a polynomial-time algorithm.