On J. Goodman's comment to "Language Trees and Zipping"

Abstract

Motivated by the recent submission to cond-mat archives by J. Goodman (cond-mat/0202383) whose results apparently discredit the approach we have proposed in a recent paper (Phys. Rev. Lett., 88, 048702 (2002), cond-mat/0108530), we report the results of the same experiment performed by Goodman using three different data compression schemes. As a matter of fact the three zippers display the same efficiency Goodman obtained using Naive Bayesian Methods and not, as Goodman claimed, an efficiency three times smaller. We point out the question of the extreme generality of approaches based on data compression techniques and we list a large range of potential applications, including those of interest for the physics community.