Re: Textual analysis

[thug@phantom.com (Murdering Thug)]

Tim May writes:

>Imagine what can be done with word and phrase frequency analysis, with
>examination of punctuation styles (e.g., some people use _this_ for
>emphasis while others use *this*), and so on. Entropy measures, etc.

I believe that such programs already exist. They are used to identify
unknown authors of famous documents.  I believe some of Shakespeare's
work was under close scrutiny a number of years ago, as were the
Fedaralist papers.

There was an article in Byte about three or four years ago all about
this kind of technology.

Thug