Authorship Attribution: What's Easy and What's Hard?
Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Schler, Shlomo Argamon · Touro Scholar (Touro College) · 2013
The simplest kind of authorship attribution problem—and the one that has received the most attention—is the one in which we are given a small, closed set of candidate authors and are asked to attribute an anonymous text to one of them. Usually, it is assumed that we have copious quantities of text by each candidate author and that the anonymous text is reasonably long. A number of recent survey papers amply cover the variety of methods used for solving this problem. Unfortunately, the kinds of authorship attribution problems we typically encounter in forensic contexts are more difficult than this simple version in a number of ways. First, the number of suspected writers might be very large, possibly numbering in the many thousands. Second, there is often no guarantee that the true author of an anonymous text is among the known suspects. Finally, the amount of writing we have by each candidate might be very limited and the anonymous text itself might be short.