Abstract. Techniques for identifying the author of an unattributed document can be applied to problems in information analysis and in academic scholarship. A range of methods have been proposed in the research literature, using a variety of features and machine learning approaches, but the methods have been tested on very different data and the results cannot be compared. It is not even clear whether the differences in performance are due to feature selection or other variables. In this paper we examine the use of a large publicly available collection of newswire articles as a benchmark for comparing authorship attribution methods. To demonstrate the value of having a benchmark, we experimentally compare several recent feature-based techniques for authorship attribution, and test how well these methods perform as the volume of data is increased. We show that the benchmark is able to clearly distinguish between different approaches, and that the scalability of the best methods based on using function words features is acceptable, with only moderate decline as the difficulty of the problem is increased.
The purpose of authorship search is to identify documents written by a particular author in large document collections. Standard search engines match documents to queries based on topic, and are not applicable to authorship search. In this paper we propose an approach to authorship search based on information theory. We propose relative entropy of style markers for ranking, inspired by the language models used in information retrieval. Our experiments on collections of newswire texts show that, with simple style markers and sufficient training data, documents by a particular author can be accurately found from within large collections. Although effectiveness does degrade as collection size is increased, with even 500,000 documents nearly half of the top-ranked documents are correct matches. We have also found that the authorship search approach can be used for authorship attribution, and is much more scalable than state-of-art approaches in terms of the collection size and the number of candidate authors.
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