Authorship Attribution of Online Messages using Stylometry: An Exploratory Study
International Conference on Advances in Engineering and Technology (ICAET'2014) March 29-30, 2014 Singapore · 2014
Authorship attribution process helps to identify the author of anonymous text by providing the some text samples of few authors, assuming that anonymous text is written by one of the author of known text samples. Authorship attribution of online messages can be useful for mining the writing patterns of authors, which in terms helps the forensics investigation process. Basically it is the classification problem for identifying the author of a given text. A set of documents with known authorship are used for training and aim is to automatically determine the corresponding author of an anonymous text. Unlike to other classification tasks, feature identification process to classify an author is difficult as there are different ways of speaking and writing. In recent years, practical applications for authorship attribution have grown in areas such as intelligence for linking intercepted messages to each other and to known terrorists, criminal law for identifying writers of threatening mail, civil law for copyright, and computer security for tracking authors of computer virus source code. Out of the various approaches for Authorship attribution problem, Stylometry is one of the approach to solve this problem. A Stylometry uses statistical methods to analyze a text to determine the authorship of text. This paper investigates the use of stylometry for Authorship Attribution of online messages.