Related papers: Scientific evaluation of Charles Dickens
This is the extended version of a Comment submitted to Physical Review Letters. I first point out the inappropriateness of publishing a Letter unrelated to physics. Next, I give experimental results showing that the technique used in the…
Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404--1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever. Using a…
Scholars, awards committees, and laypeople frequently discuss the merit of written works. Literary professionals and journalists differ in how much perspectivism they concede in their book reviews. Here, we quantify how strongly book…
Researchers have argued that large language models (LLMs) exhibit high-quality writing capabilities from blogs to stories. However, evaluating objectively the creativity of a piece of writing is challenging. Inspired by the Torrance Test of…
This book covers the history of probability up to Kolmogorov with essential additional coverage of statistics up to Fisher. Based on my work of ca. 50 years, it is the only suchlike book. Gorrochurn (2016) is similar but his study of events…
The frequency with which the letters of the English alphabet appear in writings has been applied to the field of cryptography, the development of keyboard mechanics, and the study of linguistics. We expanded on the statistical analysis of…
We measured entropy and symbolic diversity for English and Spanish texts including literature Nobel laureates and other famous authors. Entropy, symbol diversity and symbol frequency profiles were compared for these four groups. We also…
This paper presents the first attempt, up to our knowledge, to classify English writing styles on this scale with the challenge of classifying day to day language written by writers with different backgrounds covering various areas of…
Recently long range correlations were detected in nucleotide sequences and in human writings by several authors. We undertake here a systematic investigation of two books, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales, with respect to the…
In the year 1876 the mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote fiction under the now more famous name of Lewis Carroll, devised a beautiful voting system that has long fascinated political scientists. However, determining the winner of a…
A simple method for finding the entropy and redundancy of a reasonable long sample of English text by direct computer processing and from first principles according to Shannon theory is presented. As an example, results on the entropy of…
In this study we illustrate a statistical approach to questioned document examination. Specifically, we consider the construction of three classifiers that predict the writer of a sample document based on categorical data. To evaluate these…
Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19th century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called $\textit{The Laws of Verse}$. Today there is interest in…
Goodness-of-fit tests gauge whether a given set of observations is consistent (up to expected random fluctuations) with arising as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) draws from a user-specified probability distribution known…
The computational complexity of winner determination is a classical and important problem in computational social choice. Previous work based on worst-case analysis has established NP-hardness of winner determination for some classic voting…
The volume of scientific manuscripts is growing faster than the capacity to evaluate them, yet the institutions that govern peer review have remained largely unchanged. The result is a widening mismatch: reviewer scarcity, noisier…
Robustness in a parser refers to an ability to deal with exceptional phenomena. A parser is robust if it deals with phenomena outside its normal range of inputs. This paper reports on a series of robustness evaluations of state-of-the-art…
The main hypothesis about Thomas Bayes's intentions to write his famous Essay on probability is that he wanted to refute the arguments of David Hume against the reliability of the occurrence of miracles, published in 1748. In this paper we…
We consider the problem of distinguishing human-written creative fiction (excerpts from novels) from similar text generated by an LLM. Our results show that, while human observers perform poorly (near chance levels) on this binary…
Likelihood ratio tests are intuitively appealing. Nevertheless, a number of examples are known in which they perform very poorly. The present paper discusses a large class of situations in which this is the case, and analyzes just how…