Re: META: Getting the facts straight

From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Tue Jun 27 2000 - 00:00:18 MDT


Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> I believe there are textual analysis tools that can detect multiple
> identities, but I can't recall offhand where to find them.

There are tools for literary analysis, such as sentence length and
structure, word frequency etc to determine common authorship
as used frequently in the field of theology in biblical text analysis.

I have written a computer program which turned out to be useful in
figuring out when a new author was ghost writing under the name
of an established one. There were several different authors who
published under the name of seventh day adventist prophetess
ellen white, for example. The program is pretty simple minded.
It takes in text and makes a histogram showing when a word is
used for the first time. If several new words show up together,
thats an indication of a possible new author.

But these techniques can be fooled if the writer is trying to disguise
herself. Unless I have a looooot of text, this tool would be useless
in determining if Bonzer and Kretler are the same person. spike



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