Cross-domain authorship attribution combining instance-based and profile-based features notebook for PAN at CLEF 2019

Being able to identify the author of an unknown text is crucial. Although it is a well-studied field, it is still an open problem, since a standard approach has yet to be found. In this notebook, we propose our model for the Authorship Attribution task of PAN 2019, that focuses on cross-domain setting covering 4 different languages: French, Italian, English, and Spanish. We use n-grams of characters, words, stemmed words, and distorted text. Our model has an SVM for each feature and an ensemble architecture. Our final results outperform the baseline given by PAN in almost every problem. With this model, we reach the second place in the task with an F1-score of 68%

Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

Overview of PAN 2018. Author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation

[EN] PAN 2018 explores several authorship analysis tasks enabling a systematic comparison of competitive approaches and advancing research in digital text forensics.More specifically, this edition of PAN introduces a shared task in cross-domain authorship attribution, where texts of known and unknown authorship belong to distinct domains, and another task in style change detection that distinguishes between single author and multi-author texts. In addition, a shared task in multimodal author profiling examines, for the first time, a combination of information from both texts and images posted by social media users to estimate their gender. Finally, the author obfuscation task studies how a text by a certain author can be paraphrased so that existing author identification tools are confused and cannot recognize the similarity with other texts of the same author. New corpora have been built to support these shared tasks. A relatively large number of software submissions (41 in total) was received and evaluated. Best paradigms are highlighted while baselines indicate the pros and cons of submitted approaches.The work at the Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia was funded by the MINECO research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P)Stamatatos, E.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Tschuggnall, M.; Stein, B.; Kestemont, M.; Rosso, P.; Potthast, M. (2018). Overview of PAN 2018. Author identification, author profiling, and author obfuscation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 11018:267-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98932-7_25S26728511018Argamon, S., Juola, P.: Overview of the international authorship identification competition at PAN-2011. In: Petras, V., Forner, P., Clough, P. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2011 Labs and Workshops, 19–22 September 2011, Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2011. http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesBird, S., Klein, E., Loper, E.: Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol (2009)Bogdanova, D., Lazaridou, A.: Cross-language authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014, pp. 2015–2020 (2014)Choi, F.Y.: Advances in domain independent linear text segmentation. In: Proceedings of the 1st North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (NAACL), pp. 26–33. Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, April 2000Custódio, J.E., Paraboni, I.: EACH-USP ensemble cross-domain authorship attribution. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedDaneshvar, S.: Gender identification in Twitter using n-grams and LSA. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedDaniel Karaś, M.S., Sobecki, P.: OPI-JSA at CLEF 2017: author clustering and style breach detection. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Giannella, C.: An improved algorithm for unsupervised decomposition of a multi-author document. The MITRE Corporation. Technical Papers, February 2014Glover, A., Hirst, G.: Detecting stylistic inconsistencies in collaborative writing. In: Sharples, M., van der Geest, T. (eds.) The New Writing Environment, pp. 147–168. Springer, London (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1482-6_12Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2017: safety evaluation revisited. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Hagen, M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the author obfuscation task at PAN 2018. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org (2018)Hellekson, K., Busse, K. (eds.): The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City (2014)Juola, P.: An overview of the traditional authorship attribution subtask. In: Forner, P., Karlgren, J., Womser-Hacker, C. (eds.) CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 17–20 September 2012, Rome, Italy, September 2012. http://www.clef-initiative.eu/publication/working-notesJuola, P.: The rowling case: a proposed standard analytic protocol for authorship questions. Digital Sch. Humanit. 30(suppl–1), i100–i113 (2015)Kestemont, M., Luyckx, K., Daelemans, W., Crombez, T.: Cross-genre authorship verification using unmasking. Engl. Stud. 93(3), 340–356 (2012)Kestemont, M., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2018: cross-domain authorship attribution and style change detection. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org (2018)Koppel, M., Schler, J., Bonchek-Dokow, E.: Measuring differentiability: unmasking pseudonymous authors. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 8, 1261–1276 (2007)Overdorf, R., Greenstadt, R.: Blogs, Twitter feeds, and reddit comments: cross-domain authorship attribution. Proc. Priv. Enhanc. Technol. 2016(3), 155–171 (2016)Pedregosa, F., et al.: Scikit-learn: machine learning in Python. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 12, 2825–2830 (2011)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd international competition on plagiarism detection. In: Notebook Papers of the 5th Evaluation Lab on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship and Social Software Misuse (PAN), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2011Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Stein, B.: Author obfuscation: attacking the state of the art in authorship verification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing interaction logs to understand text reuse from the web. In: Fung, P., Poesio, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013), pp. 1212–1221. Association for Computational Linguistics, August 2013. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P13-1119Rangel, F., Celli, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B., Daelemans, W.: Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, Toulouse, France, pp. 8–11. CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Rangel, F., et al.: Overview of the 2nd author profiling task at PAN 2014. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Halvey, M., Kraaij, W. (eds.) CLEF 2014 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, Sheffield, UK, pp. 15–18. CEUR-WS.org, September 2014Rangel, F., Rosso, P., G’omez, M.M., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 6th author profiling task at pan 2018: multimodal gender identification in Twitter. In: CLEF 2018 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org (2017)Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Koppel, M., Stamatatos, E., Inches, G.: Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013. In: Forner, P., Navigli, R., Tufis, D. (eds.) CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 23–26 September 2013, Valencia, Spain, September 2013Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 5th author profiling task at PAN 2017: gender and language variety identification in Twitter. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Verhoeven, B., Daelemans, W., Potthast, M., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th author profiling task at PAN 2016: cross-genre evaluations. In: Balog, K., Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Macdonald, C. (eds.) CLEF 2016 Labs and Workshops, Notebook Papers. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, September 2016Safin, K., Kuznetsova, R.: Style breach detection with neural sentence embeddings. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017Sapkota, U., Bethard, S., Montes, M., Solorio, T.: Not all character n-grams are created equal: a study in authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 93–102 (2015)Sapkota, U., Solorio, T., Montes, M., Bethard, S., Rosso, P.: Cross-topic authorship attribution: will out-of-topic data help? In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Technical Papers, pp. 1228–1237 (2014)Stamatatos, E.: Intrinsic plagiarism detection using character $$n$$n-gram Profiles. In: Stein, B., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Koppel, M., Agirre, E. (eds.) SEPLN 2009 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (PAN 2009), pp. 38–46. Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and CEUR-WS.org, September 2009. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-502Stamatatos, E.: On the robustness of authorship attribution based on character n-gram features. J. Law Policy 21, 421–439 (2013)Stamatatos, E.: Authorship attribution using text distortion. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Long Papers, vol. 1, pp. 1138–1149. Association for Computational Linguistics (2017)Stamatatos, E., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2015. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Jones, G., San Juan, E. (eds.) CLEF 2015 Evaluation Labs and Workshop - Working Notes Papers, 8–11 September 2015, Toulouse, France. CEUR-WS.org, September 2015Stamatatos, E., et al.: Clustering by authorship within and across documents. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2016 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2016. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1609/Takahashi, T., Tahara, T., Nagatani, K., Miura, Y., Taniguchi, T., Ohkuma, T.: Text and image synergy with feature cross technique for gender identification. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedTellez, E.S., Miranda-Jiménez, S., Moctezuma, D., Graff, M., Salgado, V., Ortiz-Bejar, J.: Gender identification through multi-modal tweet analysis using microtc and bag of visual words. In: Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2018 Evaluation Labs, September 2018, to be announcedTschuggnall, M., Specht, G.: Automatic decomposition of multi-author documents using grammar analysis. In: Proceedings of the 26th GI-Workshop on Grundlagen von Datenbanken. CEUR-WS, Bozen, October 2014Tschuggnall, M., et al.: Overview of the author identification task at PAN-2017: style breach detection and author clustering. In: Cappellato, L., Ferro, N., Goeuriot, L., Mandl, T. (eds.) Working Notes Papers of the CLEF 2017 Evaluation Labs. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1866. CLEF and CEUR-WS.org, September 2017. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1866

A complex network approach to stylometry

Statistical methods have been widely employed to study the fundamental properties of language. In recent years, methods from complex and dynamical systems proved useful to create several language models. Despite the large amount of studies devoted to represent texts with physical models, only a limited number of studies have shown how the properties of the underlying physical systems can be employed to improve the performance of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, I address this problem by devising complex networks methods that are able to improve the performance of current statistical methods. Using a fuzzy classification strategy, I show that the topological properties extracted from texts complement the traditional textual description. In several cases, the performance obtained with hybrid approaches outperformed the results obtained when only traditional or networked methods were used. Because the proposed model is generic, the framework devised here could be straightforwardly used to study similar textual applications where the topology plays a pivotal role in the description of the interacting agents.Comment: PLoS ONE, 2015 (to appear

Name Disambiguation from link data in a collaboration graph using temporal and topological features

In a social community, multiple persons may share the same name, phone number or some other identifying attributes. This, along with other phenomena, such as name abbreviation, name misspelling, and human error leads to erroneous aggregation of records of multiple persons under a single reference. Such mistakes affect the performance of document retrieval, web search, database integration, and more importantly, improper attribution of credit (or blame). The task of entity disambiguation partitions the records belonging to multiple persons with the objective that each decomposed partition is composed of records of a unique person. Existing solutions to this task use either biographical attributes, or auxiliary features that are collected from external sources, such as Wikipedia. However, for many scenarios, such auxiliary features are not available, or they are costly to obtain. Besides, the attempt of collecting biographical or external data sustains the risk of privacy violation. In this work, we propose a method for solving entity disambiguation task from link information obtained from a collaboration network. Our method is non-intrusive of privacy as it uses only the time-stamped graph topology of an anonymized network. Experimental results on two real-life academic collaboration networks show that the proposed method has satisfactory performance.Comment: The short version of this paper has been accepted to ASONAM 201

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method for selecting the inventory of national varieties to include in the task; (ii) producing a large and dynamic set of syntactic features using grammar induction rather than focusing on a few hand-selected features such as function words; and (iii) comparing models across both web corpora and social media corpora in order to measure the robustness of syntactic variation across registers

Personal information prediction from written texts

La détection de la paternité textuelle est un domaine de recherche qui existe depuis les années 1960. Il consiste à prédire l’auteur d’un texte en se basant sur d’autres textes dont les auteurs sont connus. Pour faire cela, plusieurs traits sur le style d’écriture et le contenu sont extraits. Pour ce mémoire, deux sous-problèmes de détection de la paternité textuelle ont été traités : la prédiction du genre et de l’âge de l’auteur. Des données collectées de blogs en ligne ont été utilisées pour faire cela. Dans ce travail, plusieurs traits (features) textuels ont été comparé en utilisant des méthodes d’apprentissage automatique. De même, des méthodes d’apprentissage profond ont été appliqués. Pour la tâche de classification du genre, les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenus en appliquant un système de vote majoritaire sur la prédiction d’autres modèles. Pour la classification d’âge, les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenu en utilisant un classificateur entrainé sur TF-IDF.Authorship Attribution (AA) is a field of research that exists since the 60s. It consists of identifying the author of a certain text based on texts with known authors. This is done by extracting features about the writing style and the content of the text. In this master thesis, two sub problems of AA were treated: gender and age classification using a corpus collected from online blogs. In this work, several features were compared using several feature-based algorithms. As well as deep learning methods. For the gender classification task, the best results are the ones obtained by a majority vote system over the outputs of several classifiers. For the age classification task, the best result was obtained using classifier trained over TFIDF