Future short term goals of research in computational analysis of stylistics in text.

The first workshop on stylistic analysis of text for information
access was held on the day following the 2005 SIGIR conference.  This
workshop addressed the automatic analysis and extraction of stylistic
aspects of natural language texts. Style, roughly defined as the
'manner' in which something is expressed, as opposed to the 'content'
of a message is usually disregarded by information access applications
as having no bearing on the target notion of relevance: systems have
typically focused on the "factual" aspect of content analysis. 

The goal of improving the textual analysis of information access
systems is a motivating factor for stylistic research. In addition,
readers, authors, and information specialists of whatever persuasion
are aware of stylistic variation.  This provides us with the added
philological motivation for research: that of understanding text,
readers, and authors better.

The program for this workshop was tight and full of presentations:
this was an exploratory meeting, with presentations ranging
extensively across various examples of non-topical analysis of text.
The data sets used, the features extracted, the target dimensions
aimed at, and the computational schemes employed varied widely,
attendant to the impressive variation in application. 

Speaking generally, taking first steps in stylistic analysis of text
is quite easy:

 - select computable textual features;
 - combine them judiciously; 
 - model the choice space; 
 - compare results from measurements on texts under consideration to
   some norm or norms.

This is a process which is familiar to any practicioner of information
access research. The challenge, returning to the motivations mentioned
above, is to ensure that the analysis has reliable predictive power
for the application under consideration, and that the results have
adequate explanatory altitude to provide purchase for further study
and generalization.

EVALUATION AND APPLICATION

Evaluation was naturally at the forefront of the presentations. The
various application areas motivated several different approaches to
evaluation, from the relatively clear case of authorship attribution
and forensic applications to the less clear cut ones one of mood
classification of blog posts. For any information access application,
the evaluation must be both operationally quantifiable and related to
some formalization of user needs --- one of the projects presented
explicitly gathered user opinions for an information retrieval system
which utilized stylistic analysis for presentation of results.

FEATURE RALLY

The crucial methodological difference between stylistic analysis and
topical information retrieval is that of feature extraction. The
features studied are different than those studied in topical analysis
of text -- in the workshop we addressed this in a Feature Rally
session, where participants were invited to present their favourite
feature in a few minutes. 

COMMON RESOURCES

To better synchronize the efforts of resources, the workshop decided
to establish a clearinghouse for common resources, a mailing list, and
a bibliography of previously published research. First and foremost,
the proceedings of this first workshop on textual stylistics in
information access will be made publicly available.

Any interested parties are welcomed to contact the organizers for
further information!

FUTURE MEETING

At the end of the proceedings, the workshop ended with the consensus
that future meetings are in order. A workshop is provisionally planned
for the next SIGIR, including a common task for participants to
provide an embryo of a common evaluation scheme. Anyone interested in
participation should contact the organizers of this years workshop to
find out more!