To do this with any accuracy you need a pre-existing corpus of "typical data".

The best signature of a given piece if text is the N-rarest words it contains, where 'rarest' is defined in terms of the frequency with which each word appears in your corpus of typical data.

However, there is no easy way to convert that to a single numerical value that will allow your 'likelyhood" approximation. Even if you took two identical pieces of text that each carried the addition of, say, the transmitting bodies--eg. 'Reuters' and 'CNN'--then those additions will likely affect any reduction to a numerical value in a way that will make comparison very hard.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco.
Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

In reply to Re: Fingerprinting text documents for approximate comparison by BrowserUk
in thread Fingerprinting text documents for approximate comparison by Mur

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.