It is a breakthrough to be able to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to find, identify and confirm the author of a text, and analyse the style of writing from a text collection. In the literary sector, the question of authorship has always been the main concern. A perfect case in point is the analysis of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's work Henry VIII. Czech researcher Petr Plechac recently released a paper titled "Relative contributions of Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII", confirming scholar James Spedding's longstanding theory of having more than one formal author for Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Plechac developed a machine learning system that determined which portions of the historical play were written by which author.

Every week, my team at Invector Labs publishes a newsletter that covers the most recent developments in AI research and technology. You can find this week's issue below. You can sign up for it below. Francois Collet is a well-known name in the artificial intelligence(AI) community. A scientist in Google's AI unit, Mr. Collet rose to prominence with the creation of Keras, one of the most popular deep learning frameworks in the market.

For a long time, scholars have assumed that William Shakespeare (1564–1616) (below right) was not the only author of some famous plays that bear his name. A discerning reader does not need AI for that. An author's unique style is like a fingerprint. Some scenes just don't "sound like" his work (the technical term is "a stylistic departure"). A second author proposed for Henry VIII (1623), John Fletcher (1579–1625), has been proposed as early as 1850.

Petr Plecháč, a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague has used machine-learning techniques to identify which parts of the play "Henry VIII" were written by William Shakespeare and which were written by John Fletcher. He has written a paper describing his findings and has uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. William Shakespeare lived and worked in the late 1500s to early 1600s, writing such famous works as "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet." He is also credited with writing "Henry VIII," though most historians agree that he had help doing so. Many believe his collaborator was a playwright by the name of John Fletcher.

In the summer of 1613, an early performance of William Shakespeare's Henry VIII--then titled All is True--found the Globe Theater packed with spectators. Cannon fire sounded as the play's eponymous monarch walked onstage toward the end of the first act, captivating audience members to such an extent that they failed to notice a fiery prop landing on the theater's thatched roof. Within an hour, the Globe had been reduced to ash. New research suggests Shakespeare didn't pen the history play-turned-tragedy by himself. Since literary analyst James Spedding first raised the possibility in 1850, scholars have speculated that Henry VIII was actually a collaboration between the Bard and John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as house playwright of the King's Men acting company.

After all these years, someone might have figured out exactly how much Shakespeare worked on one of his last plays. It's long been suspected that Shakespeare didn't write the whole of Henry VIII, but now, thanks to machine learning, we could know just how much he outsourced to a playwright friend. For those of you who aren't up on your Shakespeare, the notion that Henry VIII may have had more than one formal author is also a very old one, born from the fact that some of the scenes just don't "sound" like Shakespeare. His co-author is generally supposed to be his successor, John Fletcher. They also collaborated on The Two Noble Kinsmen: both of their names were on the published edition.

'Henry VIII' was a collaborative work by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. After Shakespeare's death in 1616, Fletcher replaced him as the house playwright for acting troupe The King's Men. It was a known fact to literary experts that the play was written by both Shakespeare and Fletcher, but it remained unknown as to who penned what parts of the play. Czech artificial intelligence researcher, Petr Plecháč, decided to solve this mystery by training a machine-learning algorithm on the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and other contemporary writers. As per his findings, the algorithm proved that several scenes of the play were written by Fletcher including much of the second act.

When the scholar James Spedding analysed the authorship of Shakespeare's Henry VIII in 1850, he pored over the details of the text and eventually attributed the play not only to the Bard, but to his successor at the King's Men theatre company, John Fletcher. Now 169 years later, an academic has used artificial intelligence to back up Spedding's theory and pin down exactly who wrote what. Petr Plechac from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague trained an algorithm on scenes from Shakespeare's later plays Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and on Fletcher's Valentinian, Monsieur Thomas, The Woman's Prize and Bonduca. He also ran a selection of scenes from works by Philip Massinger, Fletcher's successor at the King's Men and another possible candidate for authorship of Henry VIII, through the algorithm. Plechac then showed the algorithm Henry VIII.

SHAKESPEARE MAY BE one of the most famous Brits to ever live, but there's an ongoing suspicion that all the work credited to him may not actually be his. Now AI is on the case, and it seems to have confirmed one of the most widely believed theories: that the bard had a co-author on Henry VIII. As long suspected, that co-author seems to be John Fletcher. That theory has been around since 1850, but the methods of testing it have been human-based text analyses. Czech researcher Petr Plecháč turned to AI to look for patterns that humans might miss, and although the results confirmed the 169-year-old theory, there were a couple of twists worthy of the man himself. By feeding his machine learning algorithm eight plays - four by Shakespeare and four by Fletcher - the AI's verdict was that Henry VIII was a near 50/50 production between the two men.

Artificial intelligence has been used to determine how much of the play'Henry VIII' was written by William Shakespeare and how much was penned by John Fletcher. Fletcher replaced Shakespeare as the house playwright for acting troupe The King's Men in 1616 and, while literary experts have long known Henry VIII was a collaborative work, they didn't know how much of the work was written by Fletcher. To solve the puzzle, Czech artificial intelligence researcher, Petr Plecháč, decided to train a machine-learning algorithm on the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher and other contemporary writers. He then'let it loose' on a the text of Henry VIII to see if it could determine the true authorship of each scene. Mr Plecháč says the algorithm proves that Fletcher wrote several scenes - including much of the second act.