Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
and depth of brush or pen strokes contribute to this electronic signa-
ture, features that cannot normally be detected with the naked eye and
are virtually impossible to forge. Farid's team has applied this technique
to detecting art forgeries. In collaboration with the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art in New York they have analyzed 13 drawings that at one
time or another have been attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish
artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, only eight of which are now believed by
art experts to be genuine, and have found that their software is able to
distinguish perfectly between authentic drawings by Breughel and these
eight known forgeries which nevertheless fooled the experts.
Literary Style
The literary world has long argued over the question of authorship of
certain written works. Did Christopher Marlowe really write some of
the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Who was the author of
the sensational but anonymously written political novel
Primary Colors
?
These and other questions of literary attribution have been the target of
the science of stylometry, the measurement of style.
Intuitively, we might expect one of the most tell-tale signals of an
author's style to be the words that occur most rarely in their writings. In
fact the most highly regarded statistical approach to the problem is to
study the frequency of occurrence of the most common words, such as
“and”, “for”, “with” and “to”. The reason is that people's subconscious
use of very common words provides an accurate literary “fingerprint” of
their writing, precisely because the thought processes generating these
words
is
subconscious. Someone trying to imitate the style of a famous
author could fairly easily discover how often a few particularly rare words
were employed in that author's writings, and emulate their frequency, but
it is much more difficult to emulate the frequency patterns of the more
commonly occurring words.
Stylometry has been around for more than a century but it was the
advent of the computer that made possible the statistical analysis of large
corpora of literary texts. The earliest convincing demonstration of the
power of stylometry came in 1964 with the publication of the landmark
research of Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace, who employed the
technology to investigate the authorship of 12 “Federalist Papers”, polit-
ical essays published in New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788. These
essays were all signed “Publius”, but it has long been known that each of
