Characterizing Stylistic Elements in Syntactic Structure

Much of the writing styles recognized in rhetorical and composition theories involve deep syntactic elements. However, most previous research for computational stylometric analysis has relied on shallow lexico-syntactic patterns. Some very recent work has shown that PCFG models can detect distributional difference in syntactic styles, but without offering much insights into exactly what constitute salient stylistic elements in sentence structure characterizing each authorship. In this paper, we present a comprehensive exploration of syntactic elements in writing styles, with particular emphasis on interpretable characterization of stylistic elements. We present analytic insights with respect to the authorship attribution task in two different domains.