Analysis and study on text representation to improve the accuracy of the Normalized Compression Distance

The huge amount of information stored in text form makes methods that deal with texts really interesting. This thesis focuses on dealing with texts using compression distances. More specifically, the thesis takes a small step towards understanding both the nature of texts and the nature of compression distances. Broadly speaking, the way in which this is done is exploring the effects that several distortion techniques have on one of the most successful distances in the family of compression distances, the Normalized Compression Distance -NCD-.