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Learning about writing by seeing only the punctuation
- garren 5y agoNeat, but I’m missing the part where the author learned anything beyond the obvious: > … when you look at those writers’ punctuation, you can see, in a quick glance, how different they are. Wild. But beyond this and pretty pictures, what have we learned?
- tyingq 5y agoWould also be interesting to see the same thing, but with spaces where things other than punctuation were. Run-on sentences would stand out pretty well.
- junon 5y agoI wonder if this could be used to fingerprint an author. I'm sure word choice and structure would be a much better signal but also much harder to develop a model for (I speculate, I'm by no means an expert here). Less input tokens (just the punctuation) would reduce the model's complexity would it not? Would be interesting to see a classifier based on this.
- _yoqn 5y agoMy immediate thought on this is yes, but you would also want to plug in the length of the sample in characters, word count (to get a sense of the average length of word for each author). This would actually be a useful tool in some industries I can already think of…
- nefitty 5y agoIf I wanted to obscure my identity via text, changing my word choice, slang, colloquium, etc, would comprise my first naive attempt. I find myself changing the punctuation I use when pretending to be someone else, or trying to convey some personality traits that aren't natural to me. For example, one of my friends always puts a space before question marks and exclamation points. I once ran Satoshi et al.'s writings through some simple stylometry service. If I recall correctly, my search pointed to Nick Szabo. A quick Google search shows that others have come up with Szabo, Finney or Dai. I am now super curious as to what the results would be if punctuation was analyzed exclusively... Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to pursue this tangent.
- rlayton2 5y agoResearcher in authorship analysis here. Yes, punctuation specific patterns have been used in the literature for this purpose, quite a bit. Removing the words also reduces the impact of the content of an article on your results (i.e. accidentally guessing the author because the topic is baseball and you only have one writer who writes about baseball in your dataset). Typically, this type of feature is generalised of "character n-grams", but there are lots of variants.
- blondin 5y agointeresting. i also wanted to answer the same question. so i pasted two essays from one of my favorite authors in the tool. the punctuation summaries looked very different. the two essays were by Isaac Asimov -- he does have a somewhat recognizable writing style. one essay was on physics and one of demonology. then again, nlp has "stop words". i guess maths and physics would have math symbols stripped in that line of research?
- junon 5y agoVery interesting, thanks for the answer - strangely (but pleasantly) relevant area of study!
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI know—both from personal frustration with concision, and from external critique—how much I depend (overly) on punctuation to express my thoughts; it’s gotten a lot better, but… I don’t think I’ll ever be fully satisfied.
- wruza 5y agoHey, that long hyphen with no spaces! Why is it so? It works like parentheses but I never got the nuance.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoIt’s an em-dash, and I think of it like parentheses but less of an aside—and implicitly closed when used at the end of a sentence.
- shakna 5y agoecho $thing | tr -dc '[:punct:]' Running it against a bunch of my writing does produce something that feels like a common pattern of symbols. Though there doesn't seem to be munch commonality between my fiction and non-fiction writing, where I'd expected at least a little bit of an overlap.
- dustintrex 5y agoPunctuation is also an interesting way of spotting non-native English speakers. Do they quote with « guillemets » or leave spaces before punctuation marks ? French. Decimal comma instead of a period, spaces for thousands separators, or currency sign after the number instead of before it? I'll bet you 5 000,00€ they're European. „First quote mark aligned to the bottom“? East European. Group numbers larger than 1000 by twos instead of threes? 1,00,000 rupees they're Indian. Ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ ｌｅｔｔｅｒｓ？ Ｅａｓｔ Ａｓｉａｎ， ｌｉｋｅｌｙ Ｊａｐａｎｅｓｅ．
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoOne more: two spaces instead of one after a . and you're most likely looking at someone old, like 60-70 years old. I am now confused as whether this is just in Italy (I was born there), just in the US (lived there for ~9 years), or both.
- schoen 5y agoIt was commonly taught in typing classes through the late 1990s (at least). I do it myself and am a bit younger than the age range you mention. A likelier criterion is whether someone took a formal typing class or worked in a profession related to typing before the advent of WYSIWYG word processors. The justification (no pun intended) for the double space after period is that it looks better, or closer to traditional typesetting, when text is rendered in a monospaced font. While this is still my experience with reading and writing e-mail (and other text) in a terminal, it's not the way most people now compose text on most devices, since most typing is done in software with proportional fonts.
- onorton 5y ago> currency sign after the number instead of before it While they use Euros, the Republic of Ireland is an exception to this.
- oh_sigh 5y agoSurely you mean 10 crore rupees!
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- _yoqn 5y agoHere's the punctuation of the comments section so far... «»?.,,?',€'.„“?.?,,'.？，．[–]—,—();’,…’’.[–]$|-'[::]'.'-,'.[–],’:>…’,,,..,?[–]>,?''.[–].'(,').()'?.[–],.-.
- danielam 5y agoOne element of a feature set that may be used as part of a broader forensic analysis of writing samples...or for obfuscating the origin of one's writing.
- jaqalopes 5y agoI'm a professional writer and editor. This is extremely cool to me. The comparison between Blood Meridian and Absalom, Absalom! really says all you need to know about this tool. Personally I find it to be a really fascinating and original way of looking at prose. Link to the actual tool the author made for creating your own punctuation visualization: https://just-the-punctuation.glitch.me/ https://just-the-punctuation.glitch.me/
- timando 5y agoI wonder if you could use this to tell programming languages apart.
- djrockstar1 5y agoI think you absolutely could. Here's a few files I had lying around, take a guess: https://imgur.com/a/iTNJ8zw https://imgur.com/a/iTNJ8zw
- qsort 5y agoFair enough, I'll play :) The first one looks like some kind of configuration language, most likely JSON due to lots of matching { and }, colons and no semicolons. The second one I really can't tell. It's most likely some sort of curly brace language, Typescript? Java? The third one really looks like Python: no semicolons, no braces, [ and ] for list/dict access, # for comments, @ for decorators. The fourth is also tricky. I want to say HTML-ish because of the </> sequences, but it also looks like a curly brace language! I'm going to guess it's a JSX React file.
- djrockstar1 5y ago1. JSON 2. Typescript (Angular) 3. Python 4. Javascript (React) Spot on with the guesses!
- Emma_Goldman 5y agoI like the idea, when I'm about to start writing I often prepare by reading an exemplary author. I focus above all on their form, how they begin, pace and punctuate sentences. But I think the tool, while interesting, isn't quite as helpful - just seeing the punctuation by itself is gobbledegook to me.