Authorship Attribution

Abstract

Authorship attribution, the science of inferring characteristics of the author from the characteristics of documents written by that author, is a problem with a long history and a wide range of application. Recent work in "non-traditional" authorship attribution demonstrates the practicality of automatically analyzing documents based on authorial style, but the state of the art is confusing. Analyses are difficult to apply, little is known about type or rate of errors, and few "best practices" are available. In part because of this confusion, the field has perhaps had less uptake and general acceptance than is its due.This review surveys the history and present state of the discipline, presenting some comparative results when available. It shows, first, that the discipline is quite successful, even in difficult cases involving small documents in unfamiliar and less studied languages; it further analyzes the types of analysis and features used and tries to determine characteristics of well-performing systems, finally formulating these in a set of recommendations for best practices.

Erratum: How to do things with historical texts

“…But that memorable illustration rests on exceptional conditions. It presumes: a control group of other texts whose authorship is incontrovertibly established and which reveal reliance on pet function-words; comparison works in the same genre produced at the same time; a small number of candidate authors (preferably two); and, to wit, conditions of falsifiability specified in advance (Craig, 2004, p. 287;Juola, 2006). Since these parameters are largely absent whenever we attempt a critical judgment of what a composition most instructively 'is' (LM, p. 5), Lee and Martin's reliance upon the forensic question of who physically moved pen on paper is inapt for rendering word counts plausibly determinative of much else.…”

Syntactic Dependency-Based N-grams: More Evidence of Usefulness in Classification

“…We discussed the state of the art of the authorship attribution problem in our previous work on application of syntactic n-grams for authorship attribution [1]; also see various related works on authorship attribution [7,8,9,10], among many others. Here we will just briefly state the problem.…”

Use Fewer Instances of the Letter “i”: Toward Writing Style Anonymization

“…There is considerable prior work in authorship attribution [1,12,13]. But currently no tool is available to allow circumvention of the authorship attribution techniques to achieve anonymity.…”