@inproceedings{dinu-etal-2026-computational,
title = "Computational Authorship Attribution in the Children{'}s Tales of Oscar and Constance Wilde: The Case of ``The Selfish Giant''",
author = "Dinu, Liviu P and
Iacob, Alina and
Ciotlos, Cosmin",
editor = {Hamilton, Sil and
{\"O}hman, Emily and
Hicke, Rebecca M. M. and
Bizzoni, Yuri and
Bax, Axel and
Matthews, Jacob A. and
H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.34/",
pages = "381--389",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
abstract = "This study introduces and analyzes a novel authorship attribution case: the children{'}s stories published by Oscar and Constance Wilde. We analyzed the corpus of stories with both supervised (SVM with string kernel) and unsupervised (Hierarchical Clustering via Rank Distance) methods and found a strong stylistic similarity between the story ``The Selfish Giant'' published by Oscar Wilde and the stylometric profile of Constance Wilde. Starting from this baseline, we also explored the the capabilities of LLMs in authorship attribution via Perplexity. Our finding suggests that the story ``The Selfish Giant'' might be the result of a collaboration between Oscar and Constance Wilde. Moreover, our results pointed to the distinct stylistic fingerprints of the two authors with regards to the rest of the corpus, confirming that their respective styles are separable despite shared genre and period."
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<abstract>This study introduces and analyzes a novel authorship attribution case: the children’s stories published by Oscar and Constance Wilde. We analyzed the corpus of stories with both supervised (SVM with string kernel) and unsupervised (Hierarchical Clustering via Rank Distance) methods and found a strong stylistic similarity between the story “The Selfish Giant” published by Oscar Wilde and the stylometric profile of Constance Wilde. Starting from this baseline, we also explored the the capabilities of LLMs in authorship attribution via Perplexity. Our finding suggests that the story “The Selfish Giant” might be the result of a collaboration between Oscar and Constance Wilde. Moreover, our results pointed to the distinct stylistic fingerprints of the two authors with regards to the rest of the corpus, confirming that their respective styles are separable despite shared genre and period.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Computational Authorship Attribution in the Children’s Tales of Oscar and Constance Wilde: The Case of “The Selfish Giant”
%A Dinu, Liviu P.
%A Iacob, Alina
%A Ciotlos, Cosmin
%Y Hamilton, Sil
%Y Öhman, Emily
%Y Hicke, Rebecca M. M.
%Y Bizzoni, Yuri
%Y Bax, Axel
%Y Matthews, Jacob A.
%Y Hämäläinen, Mika
%S Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-427-9
%F dinu-etal-2026-computational
%X This study introduces and analyzes a novel authorship attribution case: the children’s stories published by Oscar and Constance Wilde. We analyzed the corpus of stories with both supervised (SVM with string kernel) and unsupervised (Hierarchical Clustering via Rank Distance) methods and found a strong stylistic similarity between the story “The Selfish Giant” published by Oscar Wilde and the stylometric profile of Constance Wilde. Starting from this baseline, we also explored the the capabilities of LLMs in authorship attribution via Perplexity. Our finding suggests that the story “The Selfish Giant” might be the result of a collaboration between Oscar and Constance Wilde. Moreover, our results pointed to the distinct stylistic fingerprints of the two authors with regards to the rest of the corpus, confirming that their respective styles are separable despite shared genre and period.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.34/
%P 381-389
Markdown (Informal)
[Computational Authorship Attribution in the Children’s Tales of Oscar and Constance Wilde: The Case of "The Selfish Giant"](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlp4dh-1.34/) (Dinu et al., NLP4DH 2026)
ACL