Style in language is more than just surface appeaxance, on the contrary, it is an essential part of the meaning conveyed by the writer. A computational theory of style could be of great use in many computational linguistics applications. A system that is 'stylistically aware' could analyze the writer's stylistic intent and understand the complex interaction of choices that produce a certain effect. In applications such as machine translation, a computational theory of stylistics would allow the preservation or modification of stylistic effects across languages. The theory would also be useful in computer-aided language instruction where, along with vocabulary.
