Statistical authorship attribution has a long history, culminating in the use of modern machine learning classification methods. Nevertheless, most of this work suffers from the limitation of assuming a small closed set of candidate authors and essentially unlimited training text for each. Real-life authorship attribution problems, however, typically fall short of this ideal. Thus, following detailed discussion of previous work, three scenarios are considered here for which solutions to the basic attribution problem are inadequate. In the first variant, the profiling problem, there is no candidate set at all; in this case, the challenge is to provide as much demographic or psychological information as possible about the author. In the second variant, the needle-in-a-haystack problem, there are many thousands of candidates for each of whom we might have a very limited writing sample.In the third variant, the verification problem, there is no closed candidate set but there is one suspect; in this case, the challenge is to determine if the suspect is or is not the author. For each variant, it is shown how machine learning methods can be adapted to handle the special challenges of that variant.
Imagine that you have been given an important text of unknown authorship, and wish to know as much as possible about the unknown author (demographics, personality, cultural background, etc.), just by analyzing the given text. This authorship profiling problem is of growing importance in the current global information environmentapplications abound in forensics, security, and commercial settings. For example, authorship profiling can help police identify characteristics of the perpetrator of a crime when there are too few (or too many) specific suspects to consider. Similarly, large corporations may be interested in knowing what types of people like or dislike their products, based on analysis of blogs and online product reviews. The question we therefore ask is: How much can we discern about the author of a text simply by analyzing the text itself? It turns out that, with varying degrees of accuracy, we can say a great deal indeed. Unlike the problem of authorship attribution (determining the author of a text from a given candidate set), discussed recently in these pages by Li, Zheng, and Chen (2006), authorship profiling does not begin with a set of writing samples from known candidate authors. Instead, we exploit the sociolinguistic observation that different groups of people speaking or writing in a particular genre and in a particular language use that language differently (Chambers et al. 2004). That is, they vary in how often they use certain words or syntactic constructions (in addition to variation in, e.g., pronunciation or intonation). The particular profile dimensions we consider here are author gender (Argamon et al. 2003), age (Koppel et al. 2006), native language
In the authorship verification problem, we are given examples of the writing of a single author and are asked to determine if given long texts were or were not written by this author. We present a new learning-based method for adducing the "depth of difference" between two example sets and offer evidence that this method solves the authorship verification problem with very high accuracy. The underlying idea is to test the rate of degradation of the accuracy of learned models as the best features are iteratively dropped from the learning process.
In this paper, we show that stylistic text features can be exploited to determine an anonymous author's native language with high accuracy. Specifically, we first use automatic tools to ascertain frequencies of various stylistic idiosyncrasies in a text. These frequencies then serve as features for support vector machines that learn to classify texts according to author native language.
Most previous work on authorship attribution has focused on the case in which we need to attribute an anonymous document to one of a small set of candidate authors. In this paper, we consider authorship attribution as found in the wild: the set of known candidates is extremely large (possibly many thousands) and might not even include the actual author. Moreover, the known texts and the anonymous texts might be of limited length. We show that even in these difficult cases, we can use similarity-based methods along with multiple randomized feature sets to achieve high precision. Moreover, we show the precise relationship between attribution precision and four parameters: the size of the candidate set, the quantity of known-text by the candidates, the length of the anonymous text and a certain robustness score associated with a attribution.
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