The two contributioms that come to mind are the Hutter cash prize for the best compressor of the English Wikipedia and the work on PPM compression-based text classification by the late Prof. Ian Witten's group at Waikato (NZ) [1,2]. The model that best compresses the input string was likely generated by the distribution from which the compression model was 'trained'

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27440093

[2] https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/dcc/2000/0...