The Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 essays published anonymously between 1787 and 1788, were one of the first subjects for natural language processing aided by a computer. Because the papers were anonymous, people were naturally curious who wrote each of the essays. Early on it was determined that the authors were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, but the authorship of individual essays wasn’t known.
In 1944, Douglass Adair conjectured the authorship of each essay, and twenty years later Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace confirmed Adair’s conclusions by Bayesian analysis. Mosteller and Wallace used a computer to carry out their statistical calculations, but they did not have an electronic version of the text.
They physically chopped a printed copy of the text into individual words and counted them. Mosteller recounted in his autobiography that until working on The Federalist Papers, he had underestimated how hard it was to count a large number things, especially little pieces of paper that could be scattered by a draft.
I’m not familiar with how Mosteller and Wallace did their analysis, but I presume they formed a prior distribution on the frequency of various words in writings known to be by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, then computed the posterior probability of authorship by each author for each essay.
The authorship of the papers was summarized in the son “Non-Stop” from the musical Hamilton:
The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays, the work divided evenly among the three men. In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays in the span of six months. John Jay got sick after writing five. James Madison wrote twenty-nine. Hamilton wrote the other fifty-one!
Yesterday I wrote about the TF-IDF statistic for the importance of words in a corpus of documents. In that post I used the books of the Bible as my corpus. Today I wanted to reuse the code I wrote for that post by applying it to The Federalist Papers.
Federalist No. 10 is the best known essay in the collection. Here are the words with the highest TF-IDF scores from that essay.
faction: 0.0084
majority: 0.0047
democracy: 0.0044
controlling: 0.0044
parties: 0.0039
republic: 0.0036
cure: 0.0035
factious: 0.0035
property: 0.0033
faculties: 0.0033
I skimmed a list of the most important words in the essays by Madison and Hamilton and noticed that Madison’s list had several words from classic literature: Achaens, Athens, Draco, Lycurgus, Sparta, etc. There were a only couple classical references in Hamilton’s top words: Lysander and Pericles. I noticed “debt” was important to Hamilton.
You can find the list of top 10 words in each essay here.
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