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Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access published online on March 1, 2008
Literary and Linguistic Computing, doi:10.1093/llc/fqn003
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Interpreting Burrows's Delta: Geometric and Probabilistic Foundations

Shlomo Argamon

Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago

Correspondence: Shlomo Argamon, Linguistic Cognition Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616. E-mail: argamon{at}iit.edu

  Abstract

While Burrows's intuitive and elegant ‘Delta’ measure for authorship attribution has proven to be extremely useful for authorship attribution, a theoretical understanding of its operation has remained somewhat obscure. In this article, I address this issue by introducing a geometric interpretation of Delta, which further allows us to interpret Delta as a probabilistic ranking principle. This interpretation gives us a better understanding of the method's fundamental assumptions and potential limitations, as well as leading to several well-founded variations and extensions.


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