Exploiting Stylistic Idiosyncrasies for Authorship Attribution
Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Schler · 2003
Introduction Early researchers in authorship attribution used a variety of statistical methods to identify stylistic discriminators characteristics which remain approximately invariant within the works of a given author but which tend to vary from author to author (Holmes 1998, McEnery & Oakes 2000). In recent years machine learning methods have been applied to authorship attribution. A few examples include (Matthews & Merriam 1993, Holmes & Forsyth 1995, Stamatatos et al 2001, de Vel et al 2001). Both the earlier "stylometric" work and the more recent machine-learning work have tended to focus on initial sets of candidate discriminators which are fairly ubiquitous. For example, the classical work of Mosteller and Wallace (1964) on the Federalist Papers used a set of several hundred function words, that is, words that are context-independent and hence unlikely to be biased towards specific topics. Other features used in even earlier work (Yule 1938) are complexity-base