Learning Patterns of Assonance for Authorship Attribution of Historical Texts

This paper deals with extracting and learning patterns of assonance as a stylistic feature for author attribution of historical texts. We describe an assonance extraction algorithm, and consider results from an extensive set of machine learning experiments, based on a historical corpus of 18th century American and British texts. The results are compared with those obtained from the use of other prosodic and traditional stylistic features.