(gentle chiming music)
- [Ribeiro] So we
have created a system
for authorship attribution.
That means the
ability to use texts
that we know who the writers
of those texts are,
and we can use that knowledge
to classify texts
that we don't know
who the author is.
- If you imagine
a block of text,
and you have all the
words in the text,
and you grey out all the nouns,
all the adjectives,
all the verbs,
all the what we
call content words,
and what you're left
with is essentially
is a chain of smaller words,
like prepositions and adverbs.
We generate networks
where each node
in the network will be a
different function word.
The edge in between
two function words
will be how many times
in a particular text
they appear one after another.
We can take a text,
any particular text,
and build this word
adjacency network for a text.
And we do this for any text.
And for a particular author,
say we have a set of
texts that we know
were written by this author,
we combine all those networks
into one combined network.
And we call that
the author profile.
- [Ribeiro] Word adjacencies,
they are capturing how often
you use one word in
the context of another.
That is, how often you use
two words next to each other.
That means that it is a proxy
for your grammarist style,
or it's related to the way in
which you use English grammar.
We have found out
that different authors
have wildly different ways
of utilizing English grammar.
And that wildly different way
of utilizing grammar manifests
on wildly different
word adjacency networks.
- We wanted to see
if we could use this
to actually answer a problem
that people want an answer to,
and one of the more
famous cases of this
is the case of
William Shakespeare
and whether or not he didn't
write some of his plays
or had help writing
some of his plays.
So, Christopher
Marlowe was a writer
and only wrote about
seven or eight plays,
but he's often been considered
as a likely candidate
for some of Shakespeare's
earlier plays
because they were written
around the same time.
We looked at this
by constructing a
profile for Marlowe
and then constructing a
profile for Shakespeare
and comparing some of the
more questionable plays
in Shakespeare's early career,
such as the three
parts of Henry VI.
When we're comparing the
three parts of Henry VI
to the Marlowe profile,
they're much, much
closer than say,
comparing the Marlowe profile
to some of Shakespeare's
later plays,
where we know that Marlowe
was not a candidate
of these plays.
And by seeing that,
typically a Marlowe profile
would be so far away
from a Shakespeare play,
and then to see it so close
to a Shakespeare play,
even closer than
Shakespeare in many cases,
suggests a lot that Marlowe
might've had a hand in this.
- Having this knowledge
will change how people learn
about Shakespeare because
we as auspicious, let's say,
are changing our perception
of how Shakespeare can serve.
Now, while we have discovered
is that the environment
of his time was much
more collaborative
than we thought it was.
That is by now everything,
about a third of the plays
that Shakespeare wrote,
contain pieces that
were not written by him.
And now that we
have other Marlowes,
we keep enlarging
the number of people
with whom Shakespeare
collaborated.
And that will help
us understand better
his creative writing process.
We know now that Marlowe
played an important role
on Shakespeare
becoming Shakespeare.
And that's something
very important.
