Rentoumi Vassiliki, Peters Timothy, Conlin Jonathan, Garrard Peter
Neuroscience Research Centre, Molecular and Clinical Science Research Institute, St. George's, University of London (SGUL), London, United Kingdom.
Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2017 Mar 22;12(3):e0171626. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171626. eCollection 2017.
We used a computational linguistic approach, exploiting machine learning techniques, to examine the letters written by King George III during mentally healthy and apparently mentally ill periods of his life. The aims of the study were: first, to establish the existence of alterations in the King's written language at the onset of his first manic episode; and secondly to identify salient sources of variation contributing to the changes. Effects on language were sought in two control conditions (politically stressful vs. politically tranquil periods and seasonal variation). We found clear differences in the letter corpus, across a range of different features, in association with the onset of mental derangement, which were driven by a combination of linguistic and information theory features that appeared to be specific to the contrast between acute mania and mental stability. The paucity of existing data relevant to changes in written language in the presence of acute mania suggests that lexical, syntactic and stylometric descriptions of written discourse produced by a cohort of patients with a diagnosis of acute mania will be necessary to support the diagnosis independently and to look for other periods of mental illness of the course of the King's life, and in other historically significant figures with similarly large archives of handwritten documents.
我们采用了一种计算语言学方法，利用机器学习技术，来研究乔治三世国王在其一生中心理健康和明显精神疾病时期所写的信件。该研究的目的是：第一，确定国王首次躁狂发作开始时其书面语言是否存在变化；第二，找出导致这些变化的显著变异来源。在两种对照条件下（政治压力时期与政治平静时期以及季节变化）探寻对语言的影响。我们发现，在一系列不同特征方面，信件语料库与精神错乱的开始存在明显差异，这些差异是由语言和信息理论特征的组合驱动的，这些特征似乎特定于急性躁狂与精神稳定之间的对比。现有与急性躁狂状态下书面语言变化相关的数据匮乏，这表明有必要对一组被诊断为急性躁狂的患者所产生的书面话语进行词汇、句法和文体计量描述，以独立支持诊断，并探寻国王一生中其他精神疾病时期，以及其他拥有类似大量手写文档存档的具有历史意义的人物。
