Serge Fleury

Allongos: longitudinal alignment for the genetic study of writers' drafts

We present Allongos, a procedure capable of aligning multiple drafts for genetic text analysis purposes. To our knowledge, this is the first time a complete alignment is attempted on the longitudinal axis in addition to the textual axis, i.e. all drafts that lead to the production of a text are consistently aligned together, taking word shifts into account. We propose a practical interface where differences between successive drafts are highlighted, giving the user control over the drafts to be displayed and automatically adapting the display to the current selection. Our experiments show that our approach is both fast and accurate.