Syntactic characteristics and similarities of Japanese authors' writing styles: A kernel-based approach

The subtree kernel and the information tree kernel proposed here measure the syntactic similarity of sentences. For two syntactic trees, these kernels are defined, respectively, as the total number of common subtrees in the syntactic trees and the total information content contained in their common subtrees, where the information content of a common subtree is calculated using its probability. Analyses using the kernels enable us to capture the syntactic characteristics and similarities of five great Japanese authors' writing styles.