The Stylist: A Pascal Program for Analyzing Prose Style
Abstract
Computational Stylists is the computer-assisted study of literary style. Computational Linguistics is the computer-assisted study of language itself. These disciplines are the automated subsets of Statistical (or Quantitative) Stylistics and Linguistics, which are the mathematical studies of style and language. All of these disciplines involve quantifying aspects of language and then manipulating these quantities in an attempt to gain insight into how and why the language works. The Stylist is a Waterloo Pascal program that analyzes the style of English prose. A style checker, The Stylist pertains to Computational Stylistics and Computer Assisted Composition Instruction (CACI) . The Stylist creates an affective model of the text based upon the following characteristics of its component words: etymology, tangibility, difficulty, emotional connotation and vigor. The Stylist then compares this model to the standards of fiction or nonfiction texts and reports results and recommendations to the user. The Stylist also creates a concordance of the user's input text using a new data structure called a Concordance Search Tree (CST). A CST is a binary search tree with a linked list threaded through it recording the order of the use of each word. An in order traversal of the tree, with a traversal of the linked list during each visit, creates a concordance. This thesis also reviews related literature and programs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA183636
Entities
People
- Thomas C. Cool
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School