<p>It sounds like you're talking about <a href="http://lsa.colorado.edu/" rel="nofollow">Latent Semantic Analysis</a>. Here's <a href="http://lsa.colorado.edu/whatis.html" rel="nofollow">their rundown</a> of what it is.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>However, LSA as currently practiced has some additional limitations. It makes no use of word order, thus of syntactic relations or logic, or of morphology. Remarkably, it manages to extract correct reflections of passage and word meanings quite well without these aids, but it must still be suspected of incompleteness or likely error on some occasions.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>It's used in a lot of automated grading programs, or systems designed to give a score to paper based on some criteria. However, because order doesn't matter, it makes syntactic and grammatical coherence much harder to measure, so quantifying 'style' might be a little hard, unless by 'style' you mean something like word choice, phrase choice, etc. </p>

<p>Here's <a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;q=latent+semantic+analysis+writing&amp;btnG=&amp;as_sdt=1%2C50" rel="nofollow">a gscholar search</a>. The first three should give a good overview.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-04T16:01:55.090Z
Welcome to the site. I think the OP is more interested in studies of people's judgements of similarity, not so much the software implementations of style identification (he seems to only mention them in reference to forming a base-line). Can you edit your answer to address the human judgement portion more clearly?
Artem Kaznatcheev
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-04T15:51:49.853Z
2012-08-04T16:02:00.250Z
2012-08-04T16:02:00.250Z
Sara Lily
<p>I was thinking last night about the possibility of an experiment that investigates the factors contributing to peoples' judgments of 'stylistic similarity' between two samples of writing.
For example, such an experiment might consist of multiple trials for each subject, each of which would present a different set of say 3 short excerpts of writing (text randomly sampled from a corpus of authors' writings... maybe no more than 500 words each).
Each participant would be asked to make a judgment of either "Which 2 of these writings are most similar in style?" OR 'Which 2 of these writings were most likely created by the same person?".</p>

<p>Part of the data analysis and interpretation might involve the use of programs similar to this one: <a href="http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php</a> . Researchers could form hypotheses about relatively low-level factors that might be important in peoples' judgments of stylistic similarity, and then write programs that would make judgments based on these low-level factors.</p>

<p>I'm assuming that research resembling or even perfectly matching what I've described above has been conducted in the past. After reading what I've written above, does anyone have any suggestions for relevant readings?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-07-30T16:22:18.880Z
I think this sounds really interesting, it's almost like "natural" natural language processing.  NLP might give you some food for thought about what features could possibly be salient to a human reader based on what works statistically for the computer.
Chuck Sherrington
<reference-request><cognitive-modeling><computational-modeling><linguistics><reading>
Judgments of similarity between samples of writing
Mynah
# Judgments of similarity between samples of writing

(Asked by: username_0 on 2012-07-30)

I was thinking last night about the possibility of an experiment that investigates the factors contributing to peoples' judgments of 'stylistic similarity' between two samples of writing.
For example, such an experiment might consist of multiple trials for each subject, each of which would present a different set of say 3 short excerpts of writing (text randomly sampled from a corpus of authors' writings... maybe no more than 500 words each).
Each participant would be asked to make a judgment of either "Which 2 of these writings are most similar in style?" OR 'Which 2 of these writings were most likely created by the same person?".

Part of the data analysis and interpretation might involve the use of programs similar to this one: <http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php> . Researchers could form hypotheses about relatively low-level factors that might be important in peoples' judgments of stylistic similarity, and then write programs that would make judgments based on these low-level factors.

I'm assuming that research resembling or even perfectly matching what I've described above has been conducted in the past. After reading what I've written above, does anyone have any suggestions for relevant readings?

**Tags:** reference-request, cognitive-modeling, computational-modeling, linguistics, reading

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I think this sounds really interesting, it's almost like "natural" natural language processing.  NLP might give you some food for thought about what features could possibly be salient to a human reader based on what works statistically for the computer.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2012-08-04. Score: 1

It sounds like you're talking about [Latent Semantic Analysis](http://lsa.colorado.edu/). Here's [their rundown](http://lsa.colorado.edu/whatis.html) of what it is.

> However, LSA as currently practiced has some additional limitations. It makes no use of word order, thus of syntactic relations or logic, or of morphology. Remarkably, it manages to extract correct reflections of passage and word meanings quite well without these aids, but it must still be suspected of incompleteness or likely error on some occasions.

It's used in a lot of automated grading programs, or systems designed to give a score to paper based on some criteria. However, because order doesn't matter, it makes syntactic and grammatical coherence much harder to measure, so quantifying 'style' might be a little hard, unless by 'style' you mean something like word choice, phrase choice, etc.

Here's [a gscholar search](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=latent+semantic+analysis+writing&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C50). The first three should give a good overview.

> **Comments:**
> **username_3**: Welcome to the site. I think the OP is more interested in studies of people's judgements of similarity, not so much the software implementations of style identification (he seems to only mention them in reference to forming a base-line). Can you edit your answer to address the human judgement portion more clearly?  

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