Changes in Style in Authors with Alzheimer's Disease
Graeme Hirst, Vanessa Wei Feng · English Studies · 2012
Even in its very early stages, Alzheimer's disease leads to changes in language that can be detected by computational analysis. These changes may include a reduced, vaguer, and more abstract vocabulary, and reduced syntactic complexity. But do these changes affect an author's essential style? We experiment with a number of standard features for authorship attribution and authorship verification to see whether they recognize late works written by authors known to have had Alzheimer's disease as being by the same author as their earlier works. The authors whom we study are Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie. Our control author (without Alzheimer's) is P. D. James. Our results were equivocal, as different frameworks yielded contrary results, but an SVM classifier was able to make age discriminations, or nearly so, for all three authors, thereby casting doubt on the underlying axiom that an author's essential style is invariant in the absence of cognitive decline.