Stylistic Experiments in Informationretrieval

A discussion on various experiments to utilize stylistic variation among texts for information retrieval purposes. 1. Stylistics Texts vary in many ways. Authors make choices when they write a text: they decide how to organize the material they have planned to introduce; they make choices between synonyms and syntactic constructions; they choose an intended audience for the text. Authors will make these choices in various ways and for various reasons: based on personal preferences, on their view of the reader, and on what they know and like about other similar texts. A style is a consistent and distinguishable tendency to make some of these linguistic choices. Style is, on a surface level, very obviously detectable as the choice between items in a vocabulary, between types of syntactical constructions, between the various ways a text can be woven from the material it is made of. It is the information carried in a text when compared to other texts, or in a sense compared to language as a whole. This information { if seen or detected by the reader { will impart to the reader a predisposition to understand the meaning of text in certain ways. Or, more roughly put, style is the diierence between two ways of saying the same thing. So, the variation in a text or diierences between texts that is not primarily topical, that has not to do with meaning, is stylistic. Naturally, demarcation of stylistic variation to topical variation is impossible. Certain meanings must or tend always to be expressed in certain styles: legal matters tend to be written in legal jargon rather than hexameter; car owner