English

A ripple in time: a discontinuity in American history

Computation and Language 2025-02-11 v7 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Social and Information Networks

Abstract

In this technical note we suggest a novel approach to discover temporal (related and unrelated to language dilation) and personality (authorship attribution) aspects in historical datasets. We exemplify our approach on the State of the Union addresses given by the past 42 US presidents: this dataset is known for its relatively small amount of data, and high variability of the size and style of texts. Nevertheless, we manage to achieve about 95\% accuracy on the authorship attribution task, and pin down the date of writing to a single presidential term.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.01185,
  title  = {A ripple in time: a discontinuity in American history},
  author = {Alexander Kolpakov and Igor Rivin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.01185},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 8 figures ; GitHub repository https://github.com/sashakolpakov/ripple_in_time ; to appear in 8th NLPIR Okayama, Japan | December 13-15, 2024 as "Discovering temporal and personality aspects in meager and highly variable text samples"