Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

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Hi, I'm planning to work on the project above but I am wondering how I should get my research and what do I have to account for when writing my code to get data and later be able to compare it to other works. I was thinking of finding the average word length, the amount of 4-6 letter words, counting words that are longer than 7 or 8 letters, but I don't know if I should have a table of common words, how many sentences and sentence length. I'm wondering what else can I have or look at reference of seeing what other people have used to make identification easier.

Thanks, would mean a lot if I can get some help on this and then start right away.

You might want to do some web searching on stylometry and read some of the research papers on how the specific algorithms work. What you're suggesting though is a great start. Keeping counts of the numbers of words of each length, how often are words repeated, how many appear in a common word list - those are all really good ideas.

You can also take advantage of many classical book available through Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/). If your methods work, you should be able to compare a couple of Shakespeare works and see similarities but see differences in style when compared to Jules Verne.

This is a really fun area of study. I worked on a commercial product some years back that was intended to help people in a company learn a company's specific style when they write documents. I think you'll enjoy the project. Please write back if you have questions or just to tell us your progress.

Howard