by Mirko Degli Esposti
Abstract: Like most human productions, language is the product of cultural evolution, and as such exhibits high levels of complexity. A natural representation of language is written text, the development of expressing language by letters or other marks. Developing of writing coincides with the developing of literature and both processes have been highly effected by the developing of technologies, up to the enormous proliferation (at least quantitatively) in our modern digital environment. In the talk we will address questions such as how to characterize originality in authors or texts, and how innovations originate amid universal features of language usage? Or again, how can we discriminate between artificially generated texts and human writings? We will do this while discussing two specific examples.
The first one regards the detection of computer generated papers in scientific literature, a problem of increasing practical importance.
The second one concern the Voynich Manuscript and we will present some recent results.