Temporal Text Classification for Romanian Novels set in the Past

In this paper we look at a task in historical linguistics and the study of language development, namely that of identifying the time when a text was written. The novelty is that we evaluate our classifier and our selected features on literary texts having their action placed in the past and written so as to give off the impression of the respective epoch. We investigate several types of features and ultimately go with a very simple set of 10 features which very accurately classifies the texts based on the century they were actually written in. We use random forests to obtain high performance.