Linguistic Profiling of Text Genres: An Exploration of Fictional vs. Non-Fictional Texts

Abstract

Texts are composed for multiple audiences and for numerous purposes. Each form of text follows a set of guidelines and structure to serve the purpose of writing. A common way of grouping texts is into text types. Describing these text types in terms of their linguistic characteristics is called ‘linguistic profiling of texts’. In this paper, we highlight the linguistic features that characterize a text type. The findings of the present study highlight the importance of parts of speech distribution and tenses as the most important microscopic linguistic characteristics of the text. Additionally, we demonstrate the importance of other linguistic characteristics of texts and their relative importance (top 25th, 50th and 75th percentile) in linguistic profiling. The results are discussed with the use case of genre and subgenre classifications with classification accuracies of 89 and 73 percentile, respectively.

Keywords

• genres
• subgenres
• linguistic profiling
• text
• NLP