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Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well. Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents. It has legal as well as academic and literary applications, ranging from the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works to forensic linguistics. ==History== Stylometry grew out of earlier techniques of analyzing texts for evidence of authenticity, authorial identity, and other questions. An early example is Lorenzo Valla's 1439 proof that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, an argument based partly on a comparison of the Latin with that used in authentic 4th Century documents. The modern practice of the discipline received major impetus from the study of authorship problems in English Renaissance drama. Researchers and readers observed that some playwrights of the era had distinctive patterns of language preferences, and attempted to use those patterns to identify authors in uncertain or collaborative works. Early efforts were not always successful: in 1901, one researcher attempted to use John Fletcher's preference for "'em," the contractional form of "them," as a marker to distinguish between Fletcher and Philip Massinger in their collaborations—but he mistakenly employed an edition of Massinger's works in which the editor had expanded all instances of "'em" to "them".〔Samuel Schoenbaum, ''Internal evidence and Elizabethan dramatic authorship; an essay in literary history and method,'' p. 171.〕 The basics of stylometry were set out by Polish philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski in ''Principes de stylométrie'' (1890). Lutosławski used this method to build a chronology of Plato's Dialogues. The development of computers and their capacities for analyzing large quantities of data enhanced this type of effort by orders of magnitude. The great capacity of computers for data analysis, however, did not guarantee quality output. In the early 1960s, Rev. A. Q. Morton produced a computer analysis of the fourteen Epistles of the New Testament attributed to St. Paul, which showed that six different authors had written that body of work. A check of his method, applied to the works of James Joyce, gave the result that ''Ulysses'' was written by five separate individuals, none of whom had any part in ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.''〔Samuel Schoenbaum, ''Internal evidence and Elizabethan dramatic authorship; an essay in literary history and method,'' p. 196.〕 In time, however, and with practice, researchers and scholars have refined their approaches and methods, to yield better results. One notable early success was the resolution of disputed authorship in twelve of ''The Federalist'' Papers by Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace. While questions of initial assumptions and methodology still arise (and, perhaps, always will), few now dispute the basic premise that linguistic analysis of written texts can produce valuable information and insight. (Indeed, this was apparent even before the advent of computers: the successful application of a textual/linguistic approach to the Fletcher canon by Cyrus Hoy and others yielded clear results in the late 1950s and early '60s.) An example of a modern study is the analysis of Ronald Reagan's radio commentaries of uncertain authorship. The stylometric (actually, handwriting analysis - see: Primary Colors) analysis of the controversial, pseudonymously authored book Primary Colors, performed by Vassar professor Donald Foster〔(''Author Unknown'' by Gavin McNett Salon November 2, 2000 )〕 in 1996, brought the field to the attention of a wider audience after correctly identifying the author as Joe Klein. In April 2015, researchers using stylometry techniques identified a play, ''Double Falsehood'', as being the work of William Shakespeare. Researchers analyzed 54 plays by Shakespeare and John Fletcher and compared average sentence length, studied the use of unusual words and quantified the complexity and psychological valence of its language. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Stylometry」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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