Authorial style is inherent in writers, journalists, and anyone who writes texts. This fact has been widely accepted by philologists for decades, but it has primarily been considered at a qualitative level. In recent years, Professor Boris Yakovlevich Ryabko, Doctor of Technical Sciences at the NSU Information Technologies Department (FIT), together with colleagues and students, has developed a quantitative method for determining authorial style using mathematical statistics. This makes it possible to determine the reliability of conclusions.
In 2025, Boris Ryabko and his co-authors published “The Amount of Data Required to Recognize a Writer’s Style Is Consistent Across Different Languages of the World” (Ryabko B., Savina N., Lulu Y.G., Han Y. // Entropy. — 2025. — Vol.27. — Iss. 10. — Art.1039. — ISSN 1099-4300). In this article, applying their method, they demonstrated that the minimum amount of text required to determine authorial style is approximately the same for Russian, English, Chinese, and Amharic languages (used in Ethiopia).
Ryabko explained,
These languages belong to very distant language groups so that even comparing text length is not easy. For example, letters in Russian are not comparable to hieroglyphs in Chinese since each hieroglyph can be translated into Russian as a whole word and sometimes even a sentence. It is important to mention that in our work, the volume of text for all languages was estimated in kilobytes, that is, in the same units.
The co-authors of the article, Yeshewas Getachew Lulu (Ethiopia) and Yi Han Yunfei (China), are postgraduate students at FIT under the supervision of Professor Ryabko. The article was published in October in a journal that is in the top quartile of scientific journals for citation frequency (Q1) according to international classification. Judging by the number of people reading the article, it is attracting considerable interest.
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