Finding Characteristic Features in Stylometric Analysis

The usual focus in authorship studies is on authorship attribution, i.e. determining which author (of a given set) wrote a piece of unknown provenance. The usual setting involves a small number of candidate authors, which means that the focus quickly revolves around a search for features that discriminate among the candidates. Whether the features that serve to discriminate among the authors are characteristic is then not of primary importance. We respectfully suggest an alternative in this article, namely a focus on seeking features that are characteristic for an author with respect to others. To determine an author's characteristic features, we first seek elements that he or she uses consistently, which we therefore regard as 'representative', but we likewise seek elements which the author uses 'distinctively' in comparison to an opposing author. We test the idea on a task recently proposed that compares Charles Dickens to both Wilkie Collins and a larger reference set comprising several authors' works from the 18th and 19th century. We then compare the use of representative and distinctive features to Burrows' 'Delta' and Hoovers' 'CoV Tuning'; we find that our method bears little similarity with either method in terms of characteristic feature selection. We show that our method achieves reliable and consistent results in the twoauthor comparison and fair results in the multi-author one, measured by separation ability in clustering.</p

Analyzing Large Collections of Electronic Text Using OLAP

Computer-assisted reading and analysis of text has various applications in the humanities and social sciences. The increasing size of many electronic text archives has the advantage of a more complete analysis but the disadvantage of taking longer to obtain results. On-Line Analytical Processing is a method used to store and quickly analyze multidimensional data. By storing text analysis information in an OLAP system, a user can obtain solutions to inquiries in a matter of seconds as opposed to minutes, hours, or even days. This analysis is user-driven allowing various users the freedom to pursue their own direction of research

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

Determining Window Size from Plagiarism Corpus for Stylometric Features

The sliding window concept is a common method for computing a profile of a document with unknown structure. This paper outlines an experiment with stylometric word-based feature in order to determine an optimal size of the sliding window. It was conducted for a vocabulary richness method called ‘average word frequency class’ using the PAN 2015 source retrieval training corpus for plagiarism detection. The paper shows the pros and cons of the stop words removal for the sliding window document profiling and discusses the utilization of the selected feature for intrinsic plagiarism detection. The experiment resulted in the recommendation of setting the sliding windows to around 100 words in length for computing the text profile using the average word frequency class stylometric feature.The sliding window concept is a common method for computing a profile of a document with unknown structure. This paper outlines an experiment with stylometric word-based feature in order to determine an optimal size of the sliding window. It was conducted for a vocabulary richness method called ‘average word frequency class’ using the PAN 2015 source retrieval training corpus for plagiarism detection. The paper shows the pros and cons of the stop words removal for the sliding window document profiling and discusses the utilization of the selected feature for intrinsic plagiarism detection. The experiment resulted in the recommendation of setting the sliding windows to around 100 words in length for computing the text profile using the average word frequency class stylometric feature

E-mail authorship attribution using customized associative classification

E-mail communication is often abused for conducting social engineering attacks including spamming, phishing, identity theft and for distributing malware. This is largely attributed to the problem of anonymity inherent in the standard electronic mail protocol. In the literature, authorship attribution is studied as a text categorization problem where the writing styles of individuals are modeled based on their previously written sample documents. The developed model is employed to identify the most plausible writer of the text. Unfortunately, most existing studies focus solely on improving predictive accuracy and not on the inherent value of the evidence collected. In this study, we propose a customized associative classification technique, a popular data mining method, to address the authorship attribution problem. Our approach models the unique writing style features of a person, measures the associativity of these features and produces an intuitive classifier. The results obtained by conducting experiments on a real dataset reveal that the presented method is very effective