Today the methods of applied statistics have penetrated very different
fields of knowledge, including the investigation oftexts ofvarious
origins. These "texts" may be considered as signal sequences of
different kinds, long genetic codes, graphic representations (which may
be coded and represented by a "text"), as well as actual narrative texts
(for example, historical chronicles, originals, documents, etc. ). One
ofthe most important problems arising here is to recognize dependent
text, i. e., texts which have a measure of "resemblance", arising from
some kind of "common origin". For instance, in pattern-recognition
problems, it is essential to identify from a large set of "patterns" a
pattern that is "closest" to a given one; in studying long signal
sequences, it is important to recognize "homogeneous subsequences" and
the places of their junction. This includes, in particular, the
well-known change-point prob lern, which is given considerable attention
in mathematical statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. As
applied to the study of narrative texts, the problern of recognizing
depen- dent and independent texts ( e . g., chronicles) Ieads to the
problern offinding texts having a common source, i. e., the sameoriginal
(such texts are naturally called dependent), or, on the contrary, having
different sources (such texts are natu- rally called independent).
Clearly, such problems are exceedingly complicated, and therefore the
appearance of new empirico-statistical recognition methods which, along
with the classical approaches, may prove useful in concrete studies (e.
g., source determination) is welcome.