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Interpreting Burrow's Delta: Geometric and Probabilistic Foundations.

While Burrows's intuitive and elegant 'Delta' measure for authorship attribution has proven to be extremely useful for authorship attribution, a theoretical understanding of its operation has remained somewhat obscure. In this article, I address this issue by introducing a geometric interpretation o...

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Published in:Literary & Linguistic Computing Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 131 - 148
Main Author: Argamon, Shlomo
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Jun2008
Subjects:
Authorship
Attribution of authorship
Burrows, John F.
Measurement
Probability theory
Distance geometry
Metric spaces
Distances
Author-publisher relations
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:While Burrows's intuitive and elegant 'Delta' measure for authorship attribution has proven to be extremely useful for authorship attribution, a theoretical understanding of its operation has remained somewhat obscure. In this article, I address this issue by introducing a geometric interpretation of Delta, which further allows us to interpret Delta as a probabilistic ranking principle. This interpretation gives us a better understanding of the method's fundamental assumptions and potential limitations, as well as leading to several well-founded variations and extensions.