LINGUIST List 14.2937

Tue Oct 28 2003

FYI: BA in English; Authorship Competition

Editor for this issue: Anne Clarke <annelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. David Denison, BA in English Language
2. Patrick Juola, Authorship Attribution Competition

We are pleased to announce a revised syllabus for the ground-breaking
English Language B.A.(Hons) degree at the University of Manchester.
>From next year the range of course units will allow students an even
wider choice of topics in English Language and/or Linguistics, plus
the opportunity to learn or improve other languages. A world-class
teaching and research grouping in Linguistics and English Language
will run the degree from the academic year 2004-2005, and teaching is
drawn from the exceptional range of expertise available. For details
of the programme please see

http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Admis/englang.htm

Please draw this to the attention of potential undergraduate students
and those who advise them. Thank you.

David Denison

Dept of English and American Studies 
University of Manchester | Manchester M13 9PL | U.K.
+44 (0)161-275 3154 (phone) +44 (0)161-275 3256 (fax)
d.denisonman.ac.uk (email) http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/staff/dd/

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to invite you all to participate in an Ad-Hoc Authorship
Attribution Competition, to be held as part of the 2004 Joint
International Conference of the Association for Literary and
Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the
Humanities (ALLC/ACH 2004). My hope is to establish a collection of
the best techniques and methods in inferring document authorship from
participants around the world.

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in interest in the
problem of determining the author of a disputed or unknown document
using computer-aided or even complete computer-driven analysis. We
hope to bring together the users and the developers of this technology
to share and to compare their methods and results. This competition
will help to create a set of ``best practices'' in authorship
attribution that can standardize analyses and spur the development of
new and improved methods.

The competition will be run using a set of specially developed corpora
(of various sorts) that will be distributed ``anonymously'' to
participating researchers. Researchers will be asked to submit their
programs which will analyze the documents and determine who wrote each
individual document. The results will be tabulated and are planned to
be presented as a special session of the ALLC/ACH meeting in Goteborg,
Sweden (June 11-16, 2004). Participation in this conference will be
encouraged but not required.

The Electronic Imprint at the University of Virginia has expressed
interest in publishing an edited volume of papers and software
describing the various methods. Participants in the competition will
be invited to submit to this volume. Technical support for
developing, testing, and standardizing software will be available from
the Digital Humanities Developer's Consortium to help in the
production of high quality, end-user friendly software to encourage
use and reuse of the methods presented.

For further details, please contact Patrick Juola at
aaacshannon.mathcs.duq.edu. More information can also be found at
the competition home page at
http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~juola/authorship_contest.html including
status reports and progressive developments.

Please pass this invitation on to any other people, groups, or mailing
lists who might find it of interest.

Thank you,

Patrick (Juola)

Math/CS Department
Duquesne University
600 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Tel: +1 412 396 5685
Fax: +1 412 396 5197
Eml: juolamathcs.duq.edu
http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~juola