Journal of Documentation 2023

Our paper ‘Tell me how you write and I’ll tell you what you read: a study on the writing style of book reviews’ (with Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell’Orletta, Elena Prat and Giulia Venturi) has been accepted for publication in the next issue of the journal of Documentation. In this work we investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres. In particular, we propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. We rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and we conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review’s platform or the literary genre.