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The Rest of the Story: Finding Meaning in Stylistic Variation

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The Structure of Style

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Abstract

The computational analysis of the style of natural language texts, computational stylistics, seeks to develop automated methods to (1) effectively distinguish texts with one stylistic character from those of another, and (2) give a meaningful representation of the differences between textual styles. Such methods have many potential applications in areas including criminal and national security forensics, customer relations management, spam/scam filtering, and scholarly research. In this chapter, we propose a framework for research in computational stylistics, based on a functional model of the communicative act. We illustrate the utility of this framework via several case studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We note that insofar as preferences for certain topics may be intimately related to other aspects of the communicative act that we consider within the purview of style, variation in content variables may be a legitimate and useful object of study. In particular, see the discussion in Sect. 5.4.

  2. 2.

    Metamorphism refers to changes in mineral assemblage and texture in rocks that have been subjected to temperatures and pressures different from those under which they originally formed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, 60645, USA

    Shlomo Argamon

  2. Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Moshe Koppel

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  1. Shlomo Argamon
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Correspondence to Shlomo Argamon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, West 31st Street 10, Chicago, 60616, Illinois, USA

    Shlomo Argamon

  2. MITRE Corporation, Bedford, 01730, Massachusetts, USA

    Kevin Burns

  3. Music Department, University of California San Diego, Gilman Drive 9500, La Jolla, 92093-0326, California, USA

    Shlomo Dubnov

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Argamon, S., Koppel, M. (2010). The Rest of the Story: Finding Meaning in Stylistic Variation. In: Argamon, S., Burns, K., Dubnov, S. (eds) The Structure of Style. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12337-5_5

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