How does Burrows' Delta work on medieval Chinese poetic texts?

TL;DR

This study evaluates Burrows' Delta, a text attribution method, on medieval Chinese poetry, demonstrating its effectiveness despite linguistic differences from European languages.

Contribution

It is the first to test Burrows' Delta on Chinese poetic texts, confirming its robustness across different language structures.

Findings

Delta accurately clusters Chinese poets by author

The method correctly identifies Tang dynasty poets

Delta remains effective despite linguistic and script differences

Abstract

Burrows' Delta was introduced in 2002 and has proven to be an effective tool for author attribution. Despite the fact that these are different languages, they mostly belong to the same grammatical type and use the same graphic principle to convey speech in writing: a phonemic alphabet with word separation using spaces. The question I want to address in this article is how well this attribution method works with texts in a language with a different grammatical structure and a script based on different principles. There are fewer studies analyzing the effectiveness of the Delta method on Chinese texts than on texts in European languages. I believe that such a low level of attention to Delta from sinologists is due to the structure of the scientific field dedicated to medieval Chinese poetry. Clustering based on intertextual distances worked flawlessly. Delta produced results where clustering showed that the samples of one author were most similar to each other, and Delta never confused different poets. Despite the fact that I used an unconventional approach and applied the Delta method to a language poorly suited for it, the method demonstrated its effectiveness. Tang dynasty poets are correctly identified using Delta, and the empirical pattern observed for authors writing in European standard languages has been confirmed once again.