Latent Semantic Analysis Applied to Authorship Questions in Textual Analysis

This study used a multi-dimensional text modeling technique, latent semantic analysis (LSA), to examine questions of authorship within the biblical book Isaiah. The Deutero-Isaiah hypothesis, which cites significant lexical and semantic differences within Isaiah as evidence for tripartite authorship, is well supported among biblical scholars. This quantitative textual analysis explored authorship and contextual semantics of Isaiah through LSA by examining the cosine vector relatedness between and across chapters and proposed authors. Because of the general semantic asymmetry across Isaiah, it is reasonable to conclude that a portion of Isaiah's semantic change is the result of multiple authorship. Further, our analysis helps demonstrate how statistically focused psycholinguistic work may be used to answer seemingly philosophical or subjective questions in other research fields.