An Image Analysis Approach to the Calligraphy of Books

Text network analysis has received increasing attention as a consequence of its wide range of applications. In this work, we extend a previous work founded on the study of topological features of mesoscopic networks. Here, the geometrical properties of visualized networks are quantified in terms of several image analysis techniques and used as subsidies for authorship attribution. It was found that the visual features account for performance similar to that achieved by using topological measurements. In addition, the combination of these two types of features improved the performance.

On the "Calligraphy" of Books

Authorship attribution is a natural language processing task that has been widely studied, often by considering small order statistics. In this paper, we explore a complex network approach to assign the authorship of texts based on their mesoscopic representation, in an attempt to capture the flow of the narrative. Indeed, as reported in this work, such an approach allowed the identification of the dominant narrative structure of the studied authors. This has been achieved due to the ability of the mesoscopic approach to take into account relationships between different, not necessarily adjacent, parts of the text, which is able to capture the story flow. The potential of the proposed approach has been illustrated through principal component analysis, a comparison with the chance baseline method, and network visualization. Such visualizations reveal individual characteristics of the authors, which can be understood as a kind of calligraphy.