Detecting Sockpuppets in Deceptive Opinion Spam

This paper explores the problem of sockpuppet detection in deceptive opinion spam using authorship attribution and verification approaches. Two methods are explored. The first is a feature subsampling scheme that uses the KL-Divergence on stylistic language models of an author to find discriminative features. The second is a transduction scheme, spy induction that leverages the diversity of authors in the unlabeled test set by sending a set of spies (positive samples) from the training set to retrieve hidden samples in the unlabeled test set using nearest and farthest neighbors. Experiments using ground truth sockpuppet data show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.Comment: 18 pages, Accepted at CICLing 2017, 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic

Authorship attribution in portuguese using character N-grams

For the Authorship Attribution (AA) task, character n-grams are considered among the best predictive features. In the English language, it has also been shown that some types of character n-grams perform better than others. This paper tackles the AA task in Portuguese by examining the performance of different types of character n-grams, and various combinations of them. The paper also experiments with different feature representations and machine-learning algorithms. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the performance of the character n-gram approach can be improved by fine-tuning the feature set and by appropriately selecting the length and type of character n-grams. This relatively simple and language-independent approach to the AA task outperforms both a bag-of-words baseline and other approaches, using the same corpus.Mexican Government (Conacyt) [240844, 20161958]; Mexican Government (SIP-IPN) [20171813, 20171344, 20172008]; Mexican Government (SNI); Mexican Government (COFAA-IPN)

The use of orthogonal similarity relations in the prediction of authorship

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_38Recent work on Authorship Attribution (AA) proposes the use of meta characteristics to train author models. The meta characteristics are orthogonal sets of similarity relations between the features from the different candidate authors. In that approach, the features are grouped and processed separately according to the type of information they encode, the so called linguistic modalities. For instance, the syntactic, stylistic and semantic features are each considered different modalities as they represent different aspects of the texts. The assumption is that the independent extraction of meta characteristics results in more informative feature vectors, that in turn result in higher accuracies. In this paper we set out to the task of studying the empirical value of this modality specific process. We experimented with different ways of generating the meta characteristics on different data sets with different numbers of authors and genres. Our results show that by extracting the meta characteristics from splitting features by their linguistic dimension we achieve consistent improvement of prediction accuracy.This research was partially supported by ONR grant N00014-12-1-0217 and by NSF award 1254108. It was also supported in part by the CONACYT grant 134186 and by the European Commission as part of the WIQ-EI project (project no. 269180) within the FP7 People Programme.Sapkota, U.; Solorio, T.; Montes Gómez, M.; Rosso, P. (2013). The use of orthogonal similarity relations in the prediction of authorship. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer Verlag (Germany). 463-475. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_38S463475Baker, L.D., McCallum, A.: Distributional clustering of words for text classification. 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In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 288–298. Association for Computational Linguistics, Portland (2011)Hayes, J.H.: Authorship attribution: A principal component and linear discriminant analysis of the consistent programmer hypothesis. I. J. Comput. Appl., 79–99 (2008)Houvardas, J., Stamatatos, E.: N-gram feature selection for authorship identification. In: Euzenat, J., Domingue, J. (eds.) AIMSA 2006. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4183, pp. 77–86. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Karypis, G.: CLUTO - a clustering toolkit. Tech. Rep. #02-017 (November 2003)Keselj, V., Peng, F., Cercone, N., Thomas, C.: N-gram based author profiles for authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 255–264 (2003)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Argamon, S.: Authorship attribution in the wild. Language Resources and Evaluation 45, 83–94 (2011)Lewis, D.D., Yang, Y., Rose, T.G., Li, F.: Rcv1: A new benchmark collection for text categorization research. Journal of Machine Learning Research 5, 361–397 (2004)Luyckx, K., Daelemans, W.: Authorship attribution and verification with many authors and limited data. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008), Manchester, UK, pp. 513–520 (August 2008)Luyckx, K., Daelemans, W.: The effect of author set size and data size in authorship attribution. In: Literary and Linguistic Computing, pp. 1–21 (August 2010)Marneffe, M.D., MacCartney, B., Manning, C.D.: Generating typed dependency parses from phrase structure parses. In: LREC 2006 (2006)Plakias, S., Stamatatos, E.: Tensor space models for authorship identification. In: Darzentas, J., Vouros, G.A., Vosinakis, S., Arnellos, A. (eds.) SETN 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5138, pp. 239–249. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Raghavan, S., Kovashka, A., Mooney, R.: Authorship attribution using probabilistic context-free grammars. In: Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers, pp. 38–42. Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala (2010)Slonim, N., Tishby, N.: The power of word clusters for text classification. In: 23rd European Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR (2001)Solorio, T., Pillay, S., Raghavan, S., Montes-y-Gómez: Generating metafeatures for authorship attribution on web forum posts. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2011, pp. 156–164. AFNLP, Chiang Mai (2011)Stamatatos, E.: Author identification using imbalanced and limited training texts. In: 18th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2007, pp. 237–241 (September 2007)Stamatatos, E.: Author identification: Using text sampling to handle the class imbalance problem. 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Construction and evaluation of classifiers for forensic document analysis

In this study we illustrate a statistical approach to questioned document examination. Specifically, we consider the construction of three classifiers that predict the writer of a sample document based on categorical data. To evaluate these classifiers, we use a data set with a large number of writers and a small number of writing samples per writer. Since the resulting classifiers were found to have near perfect accuracy using leave-one-out cross-validation, we propose a novel Bayesian-based cross-validation method for evaluating the classifiers.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS379 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org