stylometrician

　　A person who uses statistical analysis to study the style and content of text or speech.

　　用统计分析的方法来研究文本或讲话的风格和内容的人。

　　Men and women ostensibly write the same language, on the other hand, but according to a recent article in The Boston Globe, they do so in ways that immediately reveal which sex is doing the writing. A team of Israeli scientists, the Globe article reports, punchedsintosa computer some 600 published documents and devised an algorithm that could predict with 80 percent accuracy the sex of the author. ...

　　When the Israeli stylometricians, as they call themselves, study a text, they scrub it clean of everything that's "topic specific" - in other words, no "gown," no "princess," no "keg," no "bullet-resistant." This is how sophisticated language analysts work these days. They ignore the obvious stuff and concentrate instead on the seemingly unobtrusive little tics that the writer and reader barely notice. The process is a little like identifying Tom Wolfe by ignoring his suits and his spats and concentrating instead on his socks, but it gets results. Seven years ago, for example, Donald Foster, the Vassar English professor and self-styled "forensic linguist," fingered Joe Klein as the author of "Primary Colors" from Klein's use of punctuation and adverbs.

　　--"Sexed Texts," The New York Times, August 10, 2003

　　　另一方面，从表面上看，男性和女性用同一语言写作；但是，据《波士顿环球报》最近刊登的一篇文章说，他们写作的风格和内容却不一样，一下子便可看出文章是男性写的还是女性写的。《波士顿环球报》的那篇文章报道说，一组以色列科学家把约六百项公开发表的文件输入计算机并设计了一种算法，这种算法能以80%的正确率预言作者的性别。……

　　这些以色列风格统计分析家--他们是这样自称的--在研究一个文本时，将文本中所有"有关具体主题的"词语通统去掉，换言之，就是没有"罩衣"，没有"公主"，没有"小桶"，没有"防弹物"。这就是当今老练的语言分析家的工作方法。他们置明显的东西于不顾，而将注意力集中在作者和读者几乎不注意的看似不引人注意的琐碎的习惯性用语上。这一过程有点像通过不问他穿什么衣服和鞋罩而集中注意其袜子来识别汤姆·沃尔夫，但是这种办法能出结果。例如七年前，瓦萨尔学院英语教授、自封的"修辞语言学家"唐纳德·福斯特从约(瑟夫)·克莱因使用标点符号和副词的特点确定《原色》的作者是克莱因。

　　--《由文本分辨出作者的性别》(2003年8月10日《纽约时报》）

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