On Friday Feb 2 Peter Fairley wrote:
> I'm a reporter in D.C. and I'm wondering if anyone out there knows
> something about determining authorship through textual analysis. I'm
> betting there is software that could help one do something of the
> sort...
>
> If anyone has ideas, please send them to: pfairley@cais.com or feel
> free to call me at 202-628-3728.
>
> Many thanks,
> Peter Fairley
> ---
On Friday Feb. 2 Ray Liere wrote:
>
> The Federalist Papers were written in 1787-1788 by Hamilton, Madison,
> and Jay. They are short essays that were meant to convince citizens
> to ratify the proposed U.S. Constitution. When published (usually in
> newspapers), the actual author was not indicated. Of the 85 essays,
> several are disputed as to authorship.
>
> Mosteller and Wallace use statistical methods to investigate the
> authorship of the disputed essays. Certainly this is not "software
> out of the box", but it may give you ideas on how to use existing
> statistical software to run tests for your purposes.
>
> Ray Liere
> lierer@mail.cs.orst.edu
>
Right. If you happen to have some knowledge of LISP, it should be
fairly easy to reproduce M&W's methods using a software package like
XLISPSTAT freely available from Luke Tierny at the Univ. of Minnesota
(anonymous ftp at umnstat.stat.umn.edu in /pub/xlispstat).
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