Computational authorship verification method attributes a new work to a major 2nd century African author

Justin Anthony Stover, Yaron Winter, Moshe Koppel and Mike Kestemont

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2016, vol. 67, issue 1, 239-242

Abstract: type="main">

We discuss a real-world application of a recently proposed machine learning method for authorship verification. Authorship verification is considered an extremely difficult task in computational text classification, because it does not assume that the correct author of an anonymous text is included in the candidate authors available. To determine whether 2 documents have been written by the same author, the verification method discussed uses repeated feature subsampling and a pool of impostor authors. We use this technique to attribute a newly discovered Latin text from antiquity (the Compendiosa expositio) to Apuleius. This North African writer was one of the most important authors of the Roman Empire in the 2-super-nd century and authored one of the world's first novels. This attribution has profound and wide-reaching cultural value, because it has been over a century since a new text by a major author from antiquity was discovered. This research therefore illustrates the rapidly growing potential of computational methods for studying the global textual heritage.

Date: 2016
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