Testing Hypotheses About the Influence of the Genre of Folk Songs on Their Formal Characteristics

Specialists who work with folklore texts are increasingly using mathematical methods and modern computer technologies in their research. The work is devoted to the study of genre differentiation of party songs – an important component of the winter and summer amusements of the youth of the Zaonezhye region of the XIX century. The focus is on the graph-theoretic approach for describing the structure of folklore texts in the form of a semantic network. Statistical hypotheses were formulated about the influence of genre on the formal characteristics obtained on the basis of these models. Using the nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis rank H-test, it was shown that such a relationship exists, and it is statistically significant. It suggests that graph-theoretic models can be used to solve the problem of classifying songs by their genres. The procedure for constructing graph-theoretic models and calculating characteristics is implemented in “Folklore” information system.