Abstract:
Function word adjacency networks (WANs) are
used to study the authorship of plays from the Early Modern
English period. In these networks, nodes are function words and
directed edges between two nodes represent the likelihood of
ordered co-appearance of the two words. For every analyzed
play a WAN is constructed and these are aggregated to generate
author profile networks. We first study the similarity of writing
styles between Early English playwrights by comparing the
profile WANs. The accuracy of using WANs for authorship
attribution is then demonstrated by attributing known plays
among six popular playwrights. The WAN method is shown
to additionally outperform other frequency-based methods on
attributing Early English plays. This high classification power
is then used to investigate the authorship of anonymous plays.
Moreover, WANs are shown to be reliable classifiers even when
attributing collaborative plays. For several plays of disputed coauthorship,
a deeper analysis is performed by attributing every
act and scene separately, in which we both corroborate existing
breakdowns and provide evidence of new assignments. Finally,
the impact of genre on attribution accuracy is examined revealing
that the genre of a play partially conditions the choice of the
function words used in it.
