When was Macbeth Written? Mapping Book to Time

摘要

We address the question of predicting the time when a book was written using the Google Books Ngram corpus. This prediction could be useful for authorship and plagiarism detection, identification of literary movements, and forensic document examination. We propose an unsupervised approach and compare this with four baseline measures on a dataset consisting of 36 books written between 1551 and 1969. The proposed approach could be applicable to other languages as long as corpora of those languages similar to the Google Books Ngram are available.