Words and Their Distributions

Abstract

When we leave general style as a poor bet and pay attention to words, we find that Hamilton and Madison use certain words at quite different rates. Douglass Adair brought this spectacularly to our attention by pointing out their uses of while and whilst. In our work, we have used individual words as the principal basis for measuring likelihood of authorship. Early investigations convinced us that most single variables, carefully selected or not, have little discriminating value, and that a large pool of variables provides the greatest hope of success. Sentence length is a good example of a stylistic variable which had even been used effectively elsewhere, yet failed miserably here. Since the rate for each word can be regarded as a variable, words supply a pool of thousands of variables. Furthermore, words are easily recognized and effective for discrimination.