Rank-Turbulence Delta and Interpretable Approaches to Stylometric Delta Metrics

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel authorship attribution measures, Rank-Turbulence Delta and Jensen-Shannon Delta, which improve interpretability and performance across multiple languages and datasets.

Contribution

The paper develops theoretically grounded, interpretable Delta metrics for authorship attribution, extending Burrows's classical Delta with probabilistic and token-level insights.

Findings

Jensen-Shannon Delta outperforms traditional Burrows's Delta in accuracy.

Rank-Turbulence Delta achieves comparable accuracy to Cosine Delta.

Re-evaluation of attribution algorithms on SOCIOLIT corpus shows robustness under stylistic variation.

Abstract

This article introduces two new measures for authorship attribution - Rank-Turbulence Delta and Jensen-Shannon Delta - which generalise Burrows's classical Delta by applying distance functions designed for probabilistic distributions. We first set out the theoretical basis of the measures, contrasting centred and uncentred z-scoring of word-frequency vectors and re-casting the uncentred vectors as probability distributions. Building on this representation, we develop a token-level decomposition that renders every Delta distance numerically interpretable, thereby facilitating close reading and the validation of results. The effectiveness of the methods is assessed on four literary corpora in English, German, French and Russian. The English, German and French datasets are compiled from Project Gutenberg, whereas the Russian benchmark is the SOCIOLIT corpus containing 639 works by 89 authors spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Rank-Turbulence Delta attains attribution accuracy comparable with Cosine Delta; Jensen-Shannon Delta consistently matches or exceeds the performance of canonical Burrows's Delta. Finally, several established attribution algorithms are re-evaluated on the extended SOCIOLIT corpus, providing a realistic estimate of their robustness under pronounced temporal and stylistic variation.