Abstract
This paper addresses the viability of two multivariate methods (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) in verifying the disputed authorship of a famous Arabic religious book called (Nahjul-Balagha/ Peak of Eloquence). This book occupies an exceptional position in the history of the huge debates held between the two basic Islamic sectors: Sunni'e and Shia. Therefore, it represents a serious challenge to the viability of the multivariate techniques in resolving certain types of historical and sectarian conflicts and controversies. Furthermore, verifying the authorship of this book could be a good opportunity to find out whether there are certain quantitative techniques of attribution that hold for different languages such as English and Arabic. Function words have been targeted in this paper as possible indicators of the author's identity. Accordingly, a set of Arabic function words would be tested using WordSmith Tools (version 5). It turned out that the multivariate techniques are most likely robust for addressing the type of issues raised about Nahjul- Balagha. Besides, it appeared that the statistical patterns of function word usages are quite sensitive to genre in Arabic.
Highlights
This paper is an attempt to test the capability and efficiency of the multivariate methods in settling down a real case study of verifying the authorship of a heatedly debated Arabic text
The second is a consistency question approximated in cases where the researcher is faced with a set of textual samples attributed to a single author and he has to figure out whether a given disputed text sample belongs to this set or not
It turns out that the multivariate methods (PCA and CA) are perhaps robust for addressing the issues raised about Nahjul-Balagha
Summary
This paper is an attempt to test the capability and efficiency of the multivariate methods in settling down a real case study of verifying the authorship of a heatedly debated Arabic text. Authorship verification is a particular case of authorship attribution. The questions usually posed in authorship analysis might vary according to the circumstances of the cases under investigation. Two questions are basically addressed in authorship analysis: "which author, among a clear-cut set of candidate authors, has written the questionable document?" " . Did a particular author write the document?" (Luyckx, and Daelemans 2008). The first question is approximated by attributing the disputed texts to one of the n candidate authors. The second is a consistency question approximated in cases where the researcher is faced with a set of textual samples attributed to a single author and he has to figure out whether a given disputed text sample belongs to this set or not
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