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An Information Theoretic Clustering Approach for Unveiling Authorship Affinities in Shakespearean Era Plays and Poems

Author

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  • Ahmed Shamsul Arefin
  • Renato Vimieiro
  • Carlos Riveros
  • Hugh Craig
  • Pablo Moscato

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the word frequency profiles of a set of works from the Shakespearean era to uncover patterns of relationship between them, highlighting the connections within authorial canons. We used a text corpus comprising 256 plays and poems from the 16th and 17th centuries, with 17 works of uncertain authorship. Our clustering approach is based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence and a graph partitioning algorithm, and our results show that authors' characteristic styles are very powerful factors in explaining the variation of word use, frequently transcending cross-cutting factors like the differences between tragedy and comedy, early and late works, and plays and poems. Our method also provides an empirical guide to the authorship of plays and poems where this is unknown or disputed.

Suggested Citation

  • Ahmed Shamsul Arefin & Renato Vimieiro & Carlos Riveros & Hugh Craig & Pablo Moscato, 2014. "An Information Theoretic Clustering Approach for Unveiling Authorship Affinities in Shakespearean Era Plays and Poems," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(10), pages 1-12, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0111445
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111445
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Ahmed Shamsul Arefin & Luke Mathieson & Daniel Johnstone & Regina Berretta & Pablo Moscato, 2012. "Unveiling Clusters of RNA Transcript Pairs Associated with Markers of Alzheimer’s Disease Progression," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(9), pages 1-25, September.
    2. Efstathios Stamatatos, 2009. "A survey of modern authorship attribution methods," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(3), pages 538-556, March.
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