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Authorship Attribution
Attributing documents to authors
Authorship analysis has a background in stylometry, which is the study of an
author's style of writing. The concept is based on the idea that everyone learns
language slightly differently, and measuring the nuances in people's writing will
enable us to tell them apart using only the content of their writing.
The problem has been historically performed using manual analysis and statistics,
which is a good indication that it could be automated with data mining. Modern
authorship analysis studies are almost entirely data mining-based, although quite a
significant amount of work is still done with more manually driven analysis using
linguistic styles.
Authorship analysis has many subproblems, and the main ones are as follows:
• Authorship profiling: This determines the age, gender, or other traits
of the author based on the writing. For example, we can detect the first
language of a person speaking English by looking for specific ways in
which they speak the language.
• Authorship verification: This checks whether the author of this document
also wrote the other document. This problem is what you would normally
think about in a legal court setting. For instance, the suspect's writing style
(content-wise) would be analyzed to see if it matched the ransom note.
• Authorship clustering: This is an extension of authorship verification,
where we use cluster analysis to group documents from a big set into
clusters, and each cluster is written by the same author.
However, the most common form of authorship analysis study is that of authorship
attribution, a classification task where we attempt to predict which of a set of authors
wrote a given document.
Applications and use cases
Authorship analysis has a number of use cases. Many use cases are concerned with
problems such as verifying authorship, proving shared authorship/provenance, or
linking social media profiles with real-world users.
In a historical sense, we can use authorship analysis to verify whether certain
documents were indeed written by their supposed authors. Controversial authorship
claims include some of Shakespeare's plays, the Federalist papers from the USA's
foundation period, and other historical texts.
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