A Preliminary Statistical Investigation into the impact of an N-Gram Analysis Approach based on Word Syntactic Categories toward Text Author Classification*

Quantitative analysis of literary style has heretofore utilized semantic elements-word counts. This research attempts to identify quantifiable syntactic elements of style that can be used for author identification. The measurement of syntactic elements utilizes a dictionary with one part of speech per word and looks at phrases delimited by punctuation marks. Different size permutations of words referred to as grams are counted within each text. Correlations are measured amongst the gram frequencies of eight texts pertaining to four authors, both contemporary and non-contemporary. The correlations are performed across different gram sizes of words. The same treatment is applied to a target text, the Funeral Elegy text. The approach holds for classifying texts temporally consistently across the various gram sizes. Yet a finer grained investigation is required to certify the authorship of the Funeral Elegy text.