Comparison of distance and similarity measures for stylometric analysis of Lithuanian texts

Abstract

Constant developments in information and computer technologies make it possible to handle constantly increasing amount of data, thereby expanding the research possibilities. In this article, we discuss and compare distance and similarity measures used in stylometric analysis which could be applied to analyze Lithuanian texts. As corpus for the analysis, transcripts of parliamentary debates by two politicians of the Lithuanian Parliament were chosen. Furthermore, comparison of distance measures, stylometric analysis and visualization were performed. Objective of the experiment was to identify what measures would perform better when executing stylometric analysis of Lithuanian texts and explore where these differences in the performance occur. Summarizing the experiment results, the recommendations are as follow: number of Most Frequent Words used should be at least 1000, Eder's Simple Delta measure can be used in general stylometric analysis of transcriptions of parliamentary debates of Lithuanian Parliament, in a case when Most Frequent Words are limited to 2000, Binomial Index shows an increase in performance over Eder's Simple Delta and thus it is more suitable.