Automated Authorship Attribution Using Advanced Signal Classification Techniques

Maryam Ebrahimpour, Talis Putnins, Matthew J. Berryman, Andrew Allison, Brian W.-H. Ng and Derek Abbott
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Maryam Ebrahimpour: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide
Matthew J. Berryman: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide
Andrew Allison: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide
Brian W.-H. Ng: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide
Derek Abbott: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide

Published Paper Series from Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract: In this paper, we develop two automated authorship attribution schemes, one based on Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) and the other based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification features we exploit are based on word frequencies in the text. We adopt an approach of preprocessing each text by stripping it of all characters except a-z and space. This is in order to increase the portability of the software to different types of texts. We test the methodology on a corpus of undisputed English texts, and use leave-one-out cross validation to demonstrate classification accuracies in excess of 90%. We further test our methods on the Federalist Papers, which have a partly disputed authorship and a fair degree of scholarly consensus. And finally, we apply our methodology to the question of the authorship of the Letter to the Hebrews by comparing it against a number of original Greek texts of known authorship. These tests identify where some of the limitations lie, motivating a number of open questions for future work. An open source implementation of our methodology is freely available for use at https://github.com/matthewberryman/author-detection.

Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2013-01-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as: Ebrahimpour, M., Putninš, T. J., Berryman, M. J., Allison, A., Ng, B. W.-.H. and Abbott, D., 2013, "Automated authorship attribution using advanced signal classification techniques", PloS one, 8(2), 1-12.

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Journal Article: Automated Authorship Attribution Using Advanced Signal Classification Techniques (2013)
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