Ensuring Stylistic Congruity in Collaboratively Written Text: Requirements Analysis and Design Issues by

Often, texts that have been written collaboratively do not \speak with a single voice." Eliminating stylistic incongruity, a di cult undertaking for both collaborative and singular writers, is the desired function of a software tool. This thesis describes the rst cycle of an iterative software development process towards meeting this goal. The user requirements are analyzed with respect to a model that synthesizes established research, and then the requirements are taxonomized. Then, a framework for performing computational stylistic assessments is developed for later tool design. An experiment designed to measure the subjectivity in stylistic assessment | a relevant issue for making deterministic, computational stylistic assessments | was performed; the results indicate that future stylistic assessment tools must account for di erent patterns of assessment. Several design directions motivated by these results are suggested.