More rigorously testing the hoax hypothesis

[ReneZ]

Hi Marco, thanks for this. I remember your earlier post, but had not thought of it in this context.

Let me try to understand.
In my two example texts (one derived from a meaningful plain text, the other from a fully scrambled text), the first step: finding likely function words, would lead to exactly the same result. The fact that the second is meaningless is not detected, and that is due to the fact that it still has some 'meaning' hidden deeply inside it.

It then depends on the next step: clustering word types, whether this meaninglessness can be detected. This would require that the metod is taking the distance between words into account. If it does not, it will still consider the scambled text just as meaningfull as the original one. I don't know the answer to this.

With respect to MATTR, the scrambling should be clearly visible in the result. Ideally the curve should be flat with some random noise on top. However, a "non-flat" MATTR does not indicate meaning, of course.

I really can't remember if this was tested at the time when MATTR was discussed here.

What the experiments presented at the conference show is that human-generated meaningless text does not appear random. This is not unexpected. Any test for 'meaning' should be able to distinguish human-generated meaningless text from computer-generated random text.
In this context, text generated by Torsten's app would be an interesting test object, because its algorithms generate something that (to some extent) follows Zipf's law (which is another inadequate test for meaning).