The Question of Studying Information Entropy in Poetic Texts

Abstract

One of the approaches to quantitative text analysis is to represent a given text in the form of a time series, which can be followed by an information entropy study for different text representations, such as “symbolic entropy”, “phonetic entropy” and “emotional entropy” of various orders. Studying authors’ styles based on such entropic characteristics of their works seems to be a promising area in the field of information analysis. In this work, the calculations of entropy values of the first, second and third order for the corpus of poems by A.S. Pushkin and other poets from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry were carried out. The values of “symbolic entropy”, “phonetic entropy” and “emotional entropy” and their mathematical expectations and variances were calculated for given corpora using the software application that automatically extracts statistical information, which is potentially applicable to tasks that identify features of the author’s style. The statistical data extracted could become the basis of the stylometric classification of authors by entropy characteristics.

Keywords

• quantitative text analysis
• information entropy
• author’s style features