Stylometric analysis of classical Arabic texts for genre detection

Abstract

Purpose In the context of information retrieval, text genre is as important as its content, and knowledge of the text genre enhances the search engine features by providing customized retrieval. The purpose of this study is to explore and evaluate the use of stylometric analysis, a quantitative analysis for the linguistics features of text, to support the task of automated text genre detection for Classical Arabic text. Design/methodology/approach Unsupervised clustering and supervised classification were applied on the King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic texts (KSUCCA) using the most frequent words in the corpus (MFWs) as stylometric features. Four popular distance measures established in stylometric research are evaluated for the genre detection task. Findings The results of the experiments show that stylometry-based genre clustering and classification align well with human-defined genre. The evidence suggests that genre style signals exist for Classical Arabic and can be used to support the task of automated genre detection. Originality/value This work targets the task of genre detection in Classical Arabic text using stylometric features, an approach that has only been previously applied to Arabic authorship attribution. The study also provides a comparison of four distance measures used in stylomtreic analysis on the KSUCCA, a corpus with over 50 million words of Classical Arabic using clustering and classification.