Okay, found it. It's actually a ...spam filter! (or just works like one)
Quote:
|
Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It's a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet. Take for example the "Mark as spam" button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how "I Write Like" works on my side: I feed it with "Frankenstein" and tell it, "This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley." Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.
|
Full Q&A with creator of "I write like" here:
http://www.theawl.com/2010/07/a-qa-w...rocket-science
Only 50 authors are included in the database so far, which might explain the rather odd results. Not that I'm sure it would work perfectly otherwise. But it's still fun. I tested some Orwell, and he writes like Orwell
Next fun project: find a famous writer not included in the database, and see who he writes like (except for PJ Lyon, we already tested
him)
