Open Stylometric System WebSty : Integrated Language Processing, Analysis and Visualisation

Abstract

The paper presents an open, web-based system for stylometric analysis named WebSty, which is a part of the CLARIN-PL research infrastructure. WebSty does not require local installation by users, can be used via any web browser, offers rich set-up, and runs on a computing cluster. We discuss the underlying ideas of the system, its architecture, a pipeline of language tools for processing Polish, and its integration with systems for clustering, visualizing the results of clustering, and identifying the features of the strongest discrimination power. The techniques used for feature weighting and text similarity measuring are also concisely overviewed. In conclusions, we present preliminary evaluation of WebSty on the corpus of 1000 literary works, and we report on the results of the first research applications of WebSty. Even if the system was initially focused on processing Polish texts, we also briefly discuss its development towards a multilingual system, which already supports English, German and Hungarian.