Reflection 9 : Computational Stylistics

Assalamualaikum w.b.t

          This time we learned about Computational Stylistics. In pure Computational Stylistics, computers are used to study the stylistic characteristics of particular texts, authors, genres and periods. For example, Raben & Lieberman (1976) used automatically produced indexes to study vocabulary similarity in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. While Burton used a concordancer to compare Anthony & Cleopatra and Richard II.

           Computational Stylistics  is a sub-discipline of computational linguistics. It evolved in the 1960s, in the area of “stylometry,” where the computer is used to generate data on the types, number and length of words and sentences. However, there are risks faced by this application where it forecloses the possibility of an author changing his style from text to text and there is a possibility of two authors writing alike.

          Few of the fields in Computational Stylistics are machine translation, social sciences and humanities, and literary fields; play, poems, novel, short stories and many others. Scope of Computational Stylistics are to count the frequency of common words, and rare words, to detect writing style, producing distinct and unmistakable “literary fingerprint” that can be used to determine if and when there have been collaborations with other text, detection of idiosyncratic uses of language which distinguish one author from another, determining the sentiment of a text, analyzing variation in rhetorical style among scientific articles and few others.

          An example of corpus in Computational Stylistics is anything that are related to literary works that will be chosen, for example; Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) and Emily Dickinson’s poems.

          We can also use this application of Computational Stylistics to analyse the stylistics of arabic poems which majorly contribute to da'wah and one of the ways to spread Islamic teachings.