Reflection Week 12 - Computational Stylistics

Peace be upon you

Reflection Week 12 - Computational Stylistics

In the last class, Dr Rozina explained to us about computational stylistics. Computational stylistics is a study of patterns formed in particular texts, authors, genres, periods via computational methods. Computational stylistics is a sub-discipline of computational linguistics. It evolved in 1960 and generally, it is the study of patterns formed in the process of the linguistics encoding of information. Computational stylistics is in the area of stylometry. Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well. The computer is used to generate data on the types, numbers, length of words and sentences. Hence, by using computer, the results should be more accurate and explain in linguistics patterns. In fact, stylistics analysis can detect the use of language which distinguish one author from another. Dr Rozina also explained the scope of computational stylistics which consist of literary field such as plays, poems, novels, short stories and many more. Machine translation also listed in the scope of computational stylistics. Dr Rozina also gave us a question for us to ponder regarding the computational stylistics.

In all the courses you have taken, how would all the findings from these courses be of benefit to us now? If there are any, is it beneficial?

For this semester, we are taking ENGL 3830, Error and Contrastive Analysis lectured by Dr Nora Mohd Nasir. Among all the courses we have taken, this course is an example of using computational stylistics. This is because we have to determine whether the errors made by the learners are local or global errors. In fact, we have to observe the frequency errors made by the learners. For example, how many times does the learner misuse of the pronoun in her/ his speech? Throughout the interviews made, we have to transcribe the interview word by word. This is when the machine translation software of computational stylistics takes place. Hence, the existence of computational stylistics is relevant to make human's life easier. Through the machine translation, a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one language to another. Computational Stylistics benefits human by revealing the differences of the patterns of errors made by the learners particularly second language learner. Thus, computational stylistics allows human to acknowledge the errors frequently used.