Segmenting documents by stylistic character

As part of a larger project to develop an aid for writers that would help to eliminate stylistic inconsistencies within a document, we experimented with neural networks to find the points in a text at which its stylistic character changes. Our best results, well above baseline, were achieved with time-delay networks that used features related to the author’s syntactic preferences, whereas low-level and vocabulary-based features were not found to be useful. An alternative approach with character bigrams was not successful.