Matthews and Merriam present an entertaining application that provoked the following Usenet contribution.
Subject: Shakespeare and Neural Nets From: Terry Sejnowski <terry@salk.edu> Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 02:49:35 -0800 from New Scientist 22 January 1994 p. 23 In an interesting article on the use of statistical measures to assess the attribution of texts to authors, Robert Matthews and Tom Merriam report that: "Applying our neural network to disputed works such as 'The Two Noble Kinsman' has produced some interesting results and helped to settle some bitter arguments over authorship of controversial texts. ... "The first task was to train the network. This we did by exposing it to data extracted from a large number of samples of Shakespeare's undisputed work, together with that of his successor with The King's Men [a theater], John Fletcher. ... We then set the network loose on 'The Two Noble Kinsman'. Drawing on a wide variety of essentially subjective evidence, scholars have claimed that Shakespeare's hand dominates Acts I and V, with much of the rest appearing to be by Fletcher. In March last year, our neural network agreed with these attributions -- and proferred the extra opinion that Fletcher may have received considerable help from Shakespeare in Act IV. In short, our neural network quantitatively supports the subjective view of its much more sophisticated human counterparts that 'The Two Noble Kinsman' is a genuine collaboration between Shakespeare and one of his contemporaries." These results will appear in the journal 'Literary and Linguistic Computing'. A similar approach might be used to determine the contributions of coauthors to scientific papers. Terry