A Corpus-Independent Feature Set for Style-Based Text Categorization

We suggest a corpus-independent feature set appropriate for style-based text categorization problems. To achieve this, we introduce a new measure on linguistic features, called stability, which captures the extent to which a language element, such as a word or syntactic construct, is replaceable by semantically equivalent elements. This measure may be perceived as quantifying the degree of available “synonymy” for a language item. We show that frequent but unstable features are especially useful for stylebased text categorization.