Key to hit books discovered, study claims

Academic Yejin Choi says her algorithm can predict 'highly successful literature' with 84% accuracyAuthors, publishers and literary critics struggling to unlock the secrets of successful writing can breathe a sigh of relief, after a computer science professor has announced an algorithm that can tell the difference between a dud and a literary hit.After analysing 800 novels available to download at Project Gutenberg Yejin Choi, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, claims she can predict literary "success" with 84% accuracy.Choi and her co-authors Vikas Ashok and Song Feng included a wide selection of genres in the study, with titles including fiction, adventures, mysteries, historical fiction, short stories and poetry. The researchers analysed the literary style of the first 1,000 sentences of each book, mapping a measure of "success" on to the number of downloads each title had received. This enabled them to identify "the stylistic elements that are more prominent in successful writings", giving an algorithm that can correctly distinguish "highly successful literature from its less successful counterpart" in up to 84% of cases.Less successful books, they found, contained a higher percentage of verbs, adverbs, and foreign words. "They also rely more on topical words that could be almost cliché," found the academics, "and extreme ('breathless') and negative ('bruised') words."Less successful books also "rely on verbs that are explicitly descriptive of actions... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-01-10 00:00:00 UTC ]

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