Alina Iacob
2026
Computational Authorship Attribution in the Children’s Tales of Oscar and Constance Wilde: The Case of "The Selfish Giant"
Liviu P Dinu | Alina Iacob | Cosmin Ciotlos
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
Liviu P Dinu | Alina Iacob | Cosmin Ciotlos
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
This study introduces and analyzes a novel authorship attribution case: the children’s stories published by Oscar and Constance Wilde. We analyzed the corpus of stories with both supervised (SVM with string kernel) and unsupervised (Hierarchical Clustering via Rank Distance) methods and found a strong stylistic similarity between the story "The Selfish Giant" published by Oscar Wilde and the stylometric profile of Constance Wilde. Starting from this baseline, we also explored the the capabilities of LLMs in authorship attribution via Perplexity. Our finding suggests that the story "The Selfish Giant" might be the result of a collaboration between Oscar and Constance Wilde. Moreover, our results pointed to the distinct stylistic fingerprints of the two authors with regards to the rest of the corpus, confirming that their respective styles are separable despite shared genre and period.
Voices and Echoes in Fictional Dialogue: A Study of Linguistic Coordination in Literary Texts
Ioana-Roxana Boriceanu | Alina Iacob | Liviu P. Dinu
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Ioana-Roxana Boriceanu | Alina Iacob | Liviu P. Dinu
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
This study investigates linguistic coordination in fictional dialogue, examining whether the phenomenon typically observed in natural conversation also appears in imagined exchanges created by authors. We analyse dialogues from ten English novels by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster using the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus (PDNC) to measure linguistic convergence across nine function word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon, complemented by network based measures that capture how linguistic adaptation shapes interactions among characters. The results provide evidence of convergence in both authors, confirming that linguistic coordination extends to literary dialogue. The network analysis supports these findings, revealing that alignment is generally reciprocal, unevenly distributed but widespread, and often crosses social and narrative boundaries. Taken together, these results suggest that linguistic coordination in fiction does not depend on deliberate stylistic planning, but reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing and social interaction.
A Computational Analysis of the Emergence of Therapy-speak in Social Media
Alina Iacob | Ana Sabina Uban
The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26)
Alina Iacob | Ana Sabina Uban
The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change (LChange’26)
The present article investigates semantic change in psychology-related concepts, in scientific and social media texts comparatively. We assess patterns of change over 15 years (2010-2025) and compare word usage in a corpus of Psychology journals abstracts and Reddit comments, testing whether specialized communities on social media align with psychology experts. We analyze semantic breadth, semantic displacement and neighbours similarity evolutions, and in addition include in our experiments contextual embeddings alongside static Word2Vec embeddings. Our results reveal diverse patterns of semantic change across the examined concepts and confirm that many terms are used differently on social media compared to specialized literature. Furthermore, Reddit communities focused on psychology discussions occupy an intermediate position, adopting a more objective stance than general-domain threads while remaining distinct from specialized literature.