FreeStylo: An easy-to-use stylistic device detection tool for stylometry

Stylistic devices are delibarately chosen linguistic expressions that are used to convey a certain meaning or effect.They are often used in literature to create a certain atmosphere or to convey a certain message.Due to this matter, the detection of stylistic devices in text is an important task in stylometry, the study of linguistic style.Often, finding these stylistic devices is a tedious and costly process that involves close reading of the texts, ideally by multiple experts.This is extra costly especially if researchers aim to statistically analyze the usage of stylistic devices across various texts.To improve this state, this package provides an easy-to-use command-line interface for detecting stylistic devices in text.The tool can be configured with a simple configuration file.It is designed to be usable by both experts and non-experts in programming.For those proficient in Python, this package also provides a library with a collection of classes to detect stylistic devices in text, together with customizable text preprocessing (tokenizing, POS tagging, etc.).The command-line tool is to be used on plain text files.It preprocesses the text, detects the stylistic devices specified in the configuration file, and writes the annotations to a JSON file.The classes contained in the library can be used to work with the text in a more flexible way, e.g. by using different preprocessing methods or already preprocessed text.The resulting annotations can be saved in a JSON file or directly used as a data structure in Python.Additionally the library is easily extendable with your custom stylistic device detectors.