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

Continuous N-gram Representations for Authorship Attribution

This paper presents work on using continuous representations for authorship attribution. In contrast to previous work, which uses discrete feature representations, our model learns continuous representations for n-gram features via a neural network jointly with the classification layer. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on two datasets, while producing comparable results on the remaining two

Una nueva visión de la supuesta influencia de Madame Bovary en La Regenta a través de la estilometría y el análisis de sentimientos basados en lenguaje R

Madame Bovary's supposed influence on La Regenta has been the subject of numerous critical studies although, since the beginning, it has been surrounded by controversy and debate. The traditionally adopted approach has been qualitative and based on partial, and not always objective, data. Furthermore, only merely anecdotal impressions have been sometimes the basis of different hypotheses and, consequently, the results obtained have been discordant. The main goal of this work is to provide quantitative data that allow to answer this still open question. To this end, a computational analysis of both the stylistic patterns and the emotional dimension, which underlie both novels, will be carried out by using the programming language R. In addition, the comparison between the original version of Madame Bovary and its translation into Spanish will also be addressed to test a new model for identifying equivalence in translation. Despite its limitations due its novelty, this approach can be a first step to examine new ways for investigating phenomena such as assimilation, imitation, intertextuality or plagiarism in literary texts, as well as equivalence in translation.La supuesta influencia de Madame Bovary en La Regenta, rodeada desde el inicio de polémicas y enfrentamientos, ha sido objeto de numerosos estudios críticos. El enfoque tradicionalmente adoptado ha sido de tipo cualitativo y se ha fundado en datos parciales, no siempre objetivos. Es más, en ocasiones, se han tomado como base de las distintas hipótesis tan solo impresiones meramente anecdóticas y, en consecuencia, los resultados obtenidos han sido discordantes. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es aportar datos cuantitativos que contribuyan a dar respuesta a esta cuestión aún abierta. Con este fin, llevaremos a cabo un análisis computacional de los patrones estilísticos y la dimensión emotiva que subyacen en ambas novelas utilizando para ello el lenguaje de programación R. Además de este objetivo primario se abordará también secundariamente la comparación de la versión original de Madame Bovary con su traducción al español, a fin de someter a experimentación un nuevo modelo de acercamiento a la equivalencia traductora. A pesar de que, dada su novedad, este enfoque presenta aún limitaciones, puede constituir un primer paso para explorar nuevas vías de investigación de fenómenos como la asimilación, la imitación, la intertextualidad o el plagio en textos literarios, así como de la equivalencia en traducción

Online discussions through the lens of interaction patterns

Computer-mediated communication is arguably prevailing over face-to-face. However, many of the subtleties that make in-person communication personal, cues such as an ironic tone of voice or an effortless posture, are inherently impossible to render through a screen. The context vanishes from the conversation - what is left is therefore mostly text, enlivened by occasional multimedia. At least, this seems the dominant opinion of both industry and academia, that recently focused considerable resources on a deeper understanding of natural and visual language. I argue instead that richer cues are missing from online interaction only because current applications do not acknowledge them -- indeed, communication online is already infused with nonverbal codes, and the effort needed to leverage them is well worth the amount of information they carry. This dissertation therefore focuses on what is left out of the traditional definition of content: I refer to these aspects of communication as content-agnostic. Specifically, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, I formalize what constitutes content-agnostic information in computer-mediated communication, and prove content-agnostic information is as personal to each user as its offline counterpart. For this reason, I choose as a venue of research the web forum, a supposedly text-based, impersonal communication environment, and show that it is possible to attribute a message to the corresponding author solely on the basis of its content-agnostic features -- in other words, without looking at the content of the message at all. Next, I display how abundant and how varied is the content-agnostic information that lies untapped in current applications.To this end, I analyze the content-agnostic aspects of one type of interaction, the quote, and draw conclusions on how these may support discussion, signal user status, mark relationships between users, and characterize the discussion forum as a community. One interesting implication is that discussion platforms may not need to introduce new features for supporting social signals, and conversely social networks may better integrate discussion by enhancing its content-agnostic qualities. Finally, I demonstrate how content-agnostic information reveals user behavior. I focus specifically on trolls, malicious users that disrupt communities through deceptive or manipulative actions. In fact, the language of trolls blends in with that of civil users in heated discussions, which makes collecting irrefutable evidence of trolling difficult even for human moderators. Nonetheless, I show that a combination of content-agnostic and linguistic features sets apart discussions that will eventually be trolled, and reactions to trolling posts. This provides evidence of how content-agnostic information can offer a point of view on user behavior that is at the same time different from, and complementary to, that offered by the actual content of the contribution. Popular up and coming platforms, such as Snapchat, Tumblr, or Yik Yak, are increasingly abandoning persistent, threaded, text-based discussion, in favor of ephemeral, loosely structured, mixed-media content. Although the results of this dissertation are mostly drawn from discussion forums, its research frame and methods should apply directly to these other venues, and to a broad range of communication paradigms. Also, this is but a preliminary step towards a fuller understanding of what additional cues can or should complement content to overcome the limitations of computer-mediated communication