Gramsci

1
Gramscis authorship attribution of anonymus
newspapers articles

• Maurizio Lana
• Histoire et informatique
• Textométrie des sources historiques
• 6.6.2014

2
who we are

• maurizio lana
• mirko degli esposti
• emanuele caglioti
• dario benedetto
• 1 scholar and 3 physical mathematicians

3
its always data

• the analysis of numerization of physical world
  phenomena can equally work on
• TAC imaging,
• songs,
• ECG,
• texts,

4
reason for the study

• national edition of Gramscis works, by Ministero
  dei Beni Culturali
• new work on the newspaper articles
• many anonymous newspaper articles in the journals
  and newspapers Gramsci wrote forIl Grido del
  Popolo, Avanti!, La Citta Futura
• request from the Fondazione Gramsci to start anew
  the study of anonymous articles, to find new
  evidences of Gramsci writings
• we were in 2005

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a little background

• the start is in 1847, V.J. Bunjakovskij On the
  possibility to apply determining measures of
  confidence to the results of some observing
  sciences, particularly statistics
• 1897-98, W. Lutoslawski, On Stylometry
  Principes de stylometrie
• 1959, D. R. Cox and L. Brandwood, On a
  discriminatory problem connected with the works
  of Plato
• 1962, A. Ellegard, Who was Junius?
• 1964, F. Mosteller and D. Wallace Inference and
  Disputed Authorship The Federalist
• 1978, A. Kenny, The Aristotelian ethics a study
  of the relationship between the Eudemian and
  Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
• 1980, J.P. Benzécri Pratique de lanalyse des
  donnees
• 1987, J. F Burrows, Word Patterns and Story
  Shapes The Statistical Analysis of Narrative
  Style, LLC, 2, 1987, pagg. 61-70

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in common

• they have the work at words levels

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the turning point

• G. Ledger, Re-counting Plato A Computer Analysis
  of Platos Style, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989
• the scope are
• words containing a specified letter
• words ending in a specified letter
• words with a specified letter as penultimate
• that is semantically and linguistically
  meaningless parts of the words
• I have departed from the traditional approach of
  stylometry by ignoring entirely meanings and
  grammatical functions, measuring instead the
  frequencies of words according to their
  orthographic content

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today, for me (for us)

• the key is a latent mathematical structure of
  the text
• from L. Dolez?el, A note on quantification in
  text theory, in Text Processing, S. Allen
  ed., Stockholm, 1982, pagg. 539-552
• an expression of the idea D. Khmelev, F.
  Tweedie, Using Markov chains for identification
  of writers, LLC, 16, 4, 2001, pagg. 299-307

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today, for me (for us)

• another expression D. Benedetto, E. Caglioti, V.
  Loreto et al., Language Trees and Zipping, Phys.
  Rev. Lett. 88, n. 4, 048702-1, 048702-4 (2002)
• take 1 texts, compress it with Zip
• then take another text and compress it with the
  compression dictionary of the first one
• measure the difference in size this is the
  measure of the relative entropy

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then came the AAAC

• in 2004 the american mathematician Patrick Juola
  proposed the ad-hoc authorship attribution
  competition to experimentally find the best
  method to correctly attribute anonymous
  workshttp//www.mathcs. duq.edu/juola/authorshi
  p_contest.html
• second best scorer Vlado Keselj, with a method
  based on measurements of n-grams frequencies

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the state of the QAA world in 2005

• in 2002 Jack Grieve, for his thesis Quantitative
  Authorship Attribution A History And An
  Evaluation Of Techniques, counts at least 39
  known and used methods with 93 variants for
  Quantitative AA
• the aim of AAAC prune the useless methods
• nevertheless this continue to be not science,
  but craftmanship

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in 2005 we started

• we had to prove to the Fondazione Gramsci that
  the Quantitative AA produced good results
• we choose to use two QAA methods
• relative entropy (already described)
• n-gram distances (which gave Keselj the 2 palce
  in the AAAC)

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the protocol

• phase 1 50 surely Gramscian texts 50 surely
  non-Gramscian texts
• do whatever you like to be able to recognize the
  Gramscian as Gramscian and the non-Gramscian as
  non-Gramscian
• phase 2 (blind test) 40 unidentified texts, some
  Gramscian and some not classify them correctly

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text preparation

• deletion of
• citations of any lenght
• proper nouns
• numbers
• no lemmatization e.g. the choice for a given
  tense and person of a verb contains some quantity
  of information we cannot evaluate properly in
  order to discard it

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n-grams

• sequencies of n entities you must choose (we
  chose characters)
• sliding n-grams in final a 3-gram reads fin,
  ina, nal
• to find the right n you do tests
• n-grams capture fragments of meaning, syntax,
  collocations/cooccurrences, etc.
• you have a dictionary of gramscian n-grams
• you check the n-grams of your anonymous texts
  you count the matches and the non-matches and do
  an algebric sum if positive the text is
  gramscian, if negative not

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strategy

• maximize the correct attributions
• at the same avoiding false attributions
• some missed attributions are ok if you dont
  produce false attributions
• you must have your commissioner trust you

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strategy 2

• we dont know if, how, and how much the parole
  of an author changes across matters, audience,
  genre, time,
• so we decide that we had to work on well defined
  periods their boundaries being left to decide to
  the Gramsci experts
• 1 period 1914-1921

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a little of maths

• having two methods at work, we could build a
  cartesian plane, where the results of he measures
  were plotted after normalization bringing them in
  the range -1 / 1

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phase 1 - setup
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phase 2 blind test
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the day after

• we started to do the attributions - being paid by
  Fondazione Gramsci for it - without knowing
  anything of the texts, and giving periodical
  reports to the historians who were editors of the
  various volumes of the national edition od
  Gramsci works
• we got the texts, normalized them, measured them,
  and produced a Report we sent to Fondazione
  Gramsci
• historians evaluation of the QAA no proposed
  attribution was unacceptable, even if not every
  proposed attribution was accepted
• example of report

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now we have stopped

• due to the cuts to research funds, the national
  edition is at now stopped

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some practical principles on AA

• no tool can read a text and say you this text
  was written by Francesco Stella
• you can only classify the texts you chose to work
  on, crunched by the tool you use
• all of the texts will be connected you must
  interpret the results
• you must mix anonymous or disputed works with
  control works same period, same genre, same
  language, same author, similar authors,

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be careful

• when you have proper nouns in your works, its
  easy to classify them
• R. Clement and D. Sharp, Ngram and Bayesian
  Classification of Documents for Topic and
  Authorship, LLC, 2003, 18(4)423-447
• but you dont really classifiy the texts, you
  classify the collections of proper nouns they
  contain

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why the gramsci cas was/is difficult and strange

• articles are very short between 300 and
  1000/1200 words
• all of these articles share matters, ideology,
  context
• there is no countercheck, and you work for a
  scientific and productive initiative (its not
  simply an experiment)
• the tables showing the matches are sparse tables,
  nevertheless these data work well

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now what

• Patrick Juola, the mathematician who proposed the
  AAAC, has released JGAAP, a package offering
  various tools for QAA
• http//evllabs.com/jgaap/w/index.php/
• the R package with stylo is impressive and I wish
  we had it when we started our work with Gramsci
  texts

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some references to start from

• C. Basile, D. Benedetto, E. Caglioti, M. Degli
  Esposti, An example of mathematical authorship
  attribution, Journal Of Mathematical Physics,
  2008, 49, pp. 1 20
• C. Basile, D. Benedetto, E. Caglioti, M. Degli
  Esposti, L'attribuzione dei testi gramsciani
  metodi e modelli matematici, La Matematica nella
  Società e nella Cultura, 2010, 3, pp. 235 269
• M. Lana, Come scriveva Gramsci? Metodi matematici
  per riconoscere scritti gramsciani anonimi,
  Informatica Umanistica, 2010, 3, 31-56

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some references (2)

• M. Lana, Individuare scritti gramsciani anonimi
  in un" corpus" giornalistico. Il ruolo dei metodi
  quantitativi, Studi storici rivista trimestrale
  dell'Istituto Gramsci, 52 (4), 859-880
• P. Juola, Authorship Attribution, Foundations
  and Trends in Information Retrieval, Vol. 1, No.
  3 (2006) 233334http//www.conll.org/walter/educ
  ational/material/fnt-aa.pdf
• J. Grieve, Quantitative Authorship Attribution
  An Evaluation of Techniques, LLC 22
  251-270http//dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9916105
  7/Grieve_authorshipattribution.pdf

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• thanks!