Measuring Embedding Sensitivity to Authorial Style in French: Comparing Literary Texts with Language Model Rewritings

Benjamin Icard, Lila Sainero, Alice Breton, Evangelia Zve, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can convincingly imitate human writing styles, yet it remains unclear how much stylistic information is encoded in embeddings from any language model and retained after LLM rewriting. We investigate these questions in French, using a controlled literary dataset to quantify the effect of stylistic variation via changes in embedding dispersion. We observe that embeddings reliably capture authorial stylistic features and that these signals persist after rewriting, while also exhibiting LLM-specific patterns. These analytical results offer promising directions for authorship imitation detection in the era of language models.
Anthology ID:
2026.nlp4dh-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, USA
Editors:
Sil Hamilton, Emily Öhman, Rebecca M. M. Hicke, Yuri Bizzoni, Axel Bax, Jacob A. Matthews, Mika Hämäläinen
Venues:
NLP4DH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
69–82
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Icard, Lila Sainero, Alice Breton, Evangelia Zve, and Jean-Gabriel Ganascia. 2026. Measuring Embedding Sensitivity to Authorial Style in French: Comparing Literary Texts with Language Model Rewritings. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities, pages 69–82, San Diego, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Measuring Embedding Sensitivity to Authorial Style in French: Comparing Literary Texts with Language Model Rewritings (Icard et al., NLP4DH 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.8.pdf