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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{yoffe-etal-2023-statistical,
title = "A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus",
author = {Yoffe, Gideon and
B{\"u}hler, Axel and
Dershowitz, Nachum and
Romer, Thomas and
Piasetzky, Eli and
Finkelstein, Israel and
Sober, Barak},
editor = "Rogers, Anna and
Boyd-Graber, Jordan and
Okazaki, Naoaki",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.121/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.121",
pages = "1918--1940"
}