A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus
Gideon Yoffe, Axel Bühler, Nachum Dershowitz, Thomas Romer, Eli Piasetzky, Israel Finkelstein, Barak Sober
Abstract
We present a pipeline for a statistical stylometric exploration of a hypothesized partition of a text. Given a parameterization of the text, our pipeline: (1) detects literary features yielding the optimal overlap between the hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, (2) performs a hypothesis-testing analysis to quantify the statistical significance of the optimal overlap, while conserving implicit correlations between units of text that are more likely to be grouped, and (3) extracts and quantifies the importance of features most responsible for the classification, estimates their statistical stability and cluster-wise abundance. We apply our pipeline to the first two books in the Bible, where one stylistic component stands out in the eyes of biblical scholars, namely, the Priestly component. We identify and explore statistically significant stylistic differences between the Priestly and non-Priestly components.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.findings-acl.121
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1918–1940
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.121
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.121
- Cite (ACL):
- Gideon Yoffe, Axel Bühler, Nachum Dershowitz, Thomas Romer, Eli Piasetzky, Israel Finkelstein, and Barak Sober. 2023. A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1918–1940, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus (Yoffe et al., Findings 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.findings-acl.121.pdf