A Response to Rosalind Barber's Critique of the Word Adjacency Method for Authorship Attribution

• Published in: ANQ (Lexington, Ky.) Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 291 - 296
• Main Authors: Segarra, Santiago, Eisen, Mark, Egan, Gabriel, Ribeiro, Alejandro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia Routledge 02.10.2021; Taylor & Francis Inc
• Subjects: Authorship; Auxiliary verbs; Conjunctions; Content words; English language; Function words; Inflection (Morphology); Language; Prepositions; Word meaning; Writers
• ISSN: 0895-769X; 1940-3364
• DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2020.1713714

The Word Adjacency Network (WAN) method of authorship attribution was introduced in a series of papers by the present authors between 2015 and 2018. Here, Segarra et al offer a response to the second critique and will attempt to show that Barber repeats several fallacies from Rizvi's critique that the present authors have already addressed and introduces new ones that suggest confusion about what the method actually entails. English is predominantly an analytic language (as opposed to a synthetic one) in the strict linguistic sense of mainly expressing the relationships between words via additional helper words -- called function words -- rather than by using inflection. The function words are the prepositions, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and so on that have little lexical meaning of their own but join together and show the relationships between the content words in a sentence. So common are function words that a list of the 100 words most frequently used in English would be dominated by them and would comprise about half of all that is said and written in the language.