Structural Analysis of Journal Columns Using Ordinal Patterns and Information-Theoretic Measures

Abstract

Source attribution in journalistic text is typically approached through semantic representations, such as term weighting or neural embeddings. These approaches capture topical content, but usually overlook how a text is organized as a sequence. Here, we show that purely structural, content-independent features can discriminate between news sources on their own. We converted articles from fourteen Peruvian online newspapers into numerical sequences using two independent encodings, word length and lexical frequency. Then, we analyzed each of them through ordinal pattern analysis, computing pattern and transition probabilities, permutation entropy, disequilibrium, and statistical complexity. Both encodings yield non-uniform ordinal pattern distributions, well-defined preferential transitions, and coherent entropy complexity signatures across sources. Unsupervised clustering recovers three coherent groups in the feature space, and supervised classifiers trained on these features achieve accuracy up to 0.99, which remains stable even under substantial feature reduction. The consistency of these results across two structurally unrelated encodings strongly indicates that ordinal features capture a genuine dynamical fingerprint of each source's writing style rather than an artifact of either representation, which extends this framework to Spanish-language journalism, a setting that remains comparatively underexplored in complexity-based text analysis.