{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reply-to-large-scale-quantitative-profiling","title":"Reply to: Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition","arxiv_id":"1910.12927","date":"2019-10-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Petr Plecháč","Andrew Cooper","Benjamin Nagy","Artjoms Šela"],"abstract":"In Nature Human Behaviour 3/2019, an article was published entitled \"Large-scale quantitative profiling of the Old English verse tradition\" dealing with (besides other things) the question of the authorship of the Old English poem Beowulf. The authors provide various textual measurements that they claim present \"serious obstacles to those who would advocate for composite authorship or scribal recomposition\" (p. 565). In what follows we raise doubts about their methods and address serious errors in both their data and their code. We show that reliable stylometric methods actually identify significant stylistic heterogeneity in Beowulf. In what follows we discuss each method separately following the order of the original article.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12927v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.12927v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reply-to-large-scale-quantitative-profiling","repo_url":"https://github.com/qcrit/NHB-2018-OEstylometry","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}