@inproceedings{yoffe-etal-2023-statistical,
    title = "A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus",
    author = {Yoffe, Gideon  and
      B{\"u}hler, Axel  and
      Dershowitz, Nachum  and
      Romer, Thomas  and
      Piasetzky, Eli  and
      Finkelstein, Israel  and
      Sober, Barak},
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.121",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.121",
    pages = "1918--1940",
    abstract = "We present a pipeline for a statistical stylometric exploration of a hypothesized partition of a text. Given a parameterization of the text, our pipeline: (1) detects literary features yielding the optimal overlap between the hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, (2) performs a hypothesis-testing analysis to quantify the statistical significance of the optimal overlap, while conserving implicit correlations between units of text that are more likely to be grouped, and (3) extracts and quantifies the importance of features most responsible for the classification, estimates their statistical stability and cluster-wise abundance. We apply our pipeline to the first two books in the Bible, where one stylistic component stands out in the eyes of biblical scholars, namely, the Priestly component. We identify and explore statistically significant stylistic differences between the Priestly and non-Priestly components.",
}

We present a pipeline for a statistical stylometric exploration of a hypothesized partition of a text. Given a parameterization of the text, our pipeline: (1) detects literary features yielding the optimal overlap between the hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, (2) performs a hypothesis-testing analysis to quantify the statistical significance of the optimal overlap, while conserving implicit correlations between units of text that are more likely to be grouped, and (3) extracts and quantifies the importance of features most responsible for the classification, estimates their statistical stability and cluster-wise abundance. We apply our pipeline to the first two books in the Bible, where one stylistic component stands out in the eyes of biblical scholars, namely, the Priestly component. We identify and explore statistically significant stylistic differences between the Priestly and non-Priestly components.
Yoffe, Gideon B{\"u}hler, Axel Dershowitz, Nachum Romer, Thomas Piasetzky, Eli Finkelstein, Israel Sober, Barak
A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus