Detecting Stylistic Deception
Patrick Juola · 2012
Whistleblowers and activists need the ability to communicate without disclosing their identity, as of course do kidnappers and terrorists. Recent advances in the technology of stylometry (the study of authorial style) or “authorship attribution ” have made it possible to identify the author with high reliability in a non-confrontational setting. In a confrontational setting, where the author is deliberately masking their identity (i.e. attempting to deceive), the results are much less promising. In this paper, we show that although the specific author may not be identifiable, the intent to deceive and to hide his identity can be. We show this by a reanalysis of the Brennan and Greenstadt (2009) deception corpus and discuss some of the implications of this surprising finding. 1