Stylometric Classification of Ancient Greek Literary Texts by Genre

AbstractClassification of texts by genre is an important application of natural language processing to literary corpora but remains understudied for premodern and non-English traditions. We develop a stylometric feature set for ancient Greek that enables identification of texts as prose or verse. The set contains over 20 primarily syntactic features, which are calculated according to custom, language-specific heuristics. Using these features, we classify almost all surviving classical Greek literature as prose or verse with >97% accuracy and F1 score, and further classify a selection of the verse texts into the traditional genres of epic and drama.