Word detectives: Science may help finger opinion columnist

[dalton99a]

https://apnews.com/4f6b77364787489a9c0f9692702d8fcb

Word detectives: Science may help finger opinion columnist
By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Language detectives say the key clues to who wrote the anonymous New York Times opinion piece slamming President Donald Trump may not be the odd and glimmering “lodestar,” but the itty-bitty words that people usually read right over: “I,” “of” and “but.”

And lodestar? That could be a red herring meant to throw sleuths off track, some experts say.

Experts use a combination of language use, statistics and computer science to help figure out who wrote documents that are anonymous or possibly plagiarized. They’ve even solved crimes and historical mysteries that way. Some call the field forensic linguistics, others call it stylometry or simply doing “author attribution.”

The field is suddenly at center stage after an unidentified “senior administration official” wrote in the Times that he or she was part of a “resistance” movement working from within the administration to curb Trump’s most dangerous impulses.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with requests to do that analysis and I just don’t have the time,” says Duquesne University computer and language scientist Patrick Juola.

Robert Leonard, a Hofstra University linguistics professor who has helped solve murders by examining language, says if experts could get the right number of writing samples from officials whose identities are known, “an analysis could certainly be done.”

One political scientist figures there are about 50 people in the Trump administration who fit the Times’ description as a senior administration official and could be the author. The key would be to look at how they write, the words they use, what words they put next to each other, spelling, punctuation and even tenses, experts say.

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[Bradshaw3]

1. I posted this the other day and one poster had already used the tool and got a hit

The poster said they tried several candidates but the one that kept coming up positive was John Kelly. BTW, Kelly hasn't denied it yet.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211098284

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. That's how the anonymous author of

Primary Colors was outed.

It will depend on whether the author of the NYTimes piece has enough written material out there in the public domain.