Graph convolutional networks for exploring authorship hypotheses

Abstract

This work considers a task from traditional literary criticism: Annotating a structured, composite document with information about its sources. We take the Documentary Hypothesis, a prominent theory regarding the composition of the first five books of the Hebrew bible, extract stylistic features designed to avoid bias or overfitting, and train several classification models. Our main result is that the recently-introduced graph convolutional network architecture outperforms structurallyuninformed models. We also find that including information about the granularity of text spans is a crucial ingredient when employing hidden layers, in contrast to simple logistic regression. We perform error analysis at several levels, noting how some characteristic limitations of the models and simple features lead to misclassifications, and conclude with an overview of future work.