Stylometry and Knowledge Graphs: Authorship Attribution of a French Erotic Novel at the Turn of the Century: L’enfant du bordel (1800)
Stylometry and Knowledge Graphs: Authorship Attribution of a French Erotic Novel at the Turn of the Century: L’enfant du bordel (1800)

Summary/Abstract: The authorship of the French novel L’enfant du bordel (1800) remains contested, with attributions ranging from lesser-known writer Pigault-Lebrun to revolutionary and author Mirabeau. To clarify its authorship, we conducted multiple stylometric analyses using a corpus of Eighteenth-century French novels. Comparing the distance matrix and the Ward’s linkage dendrogram reveals discrepancies in the authorship hypotheses which were examined using the General Imposters method. A knowledge graph on French Eighteenth century literature was further used to identify potentially interfering influences on similarity, like thematic relations or narrative form. Based on the stylometric results and the analysis of the knowledge graph, we conclude that the most probable author is Pigault-Lebrun.

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