Novel geometric features for off-line writer identification

Writer identification is an important field in forensic document examination. Typically, a writer identification system consists of two main steps: feature extraction and matching and the performance depends significantly on the feature extraction step. In this paper, we propose a set of novel geometrical features that are able to characterize different writers. These features include direction, curvature, and tortuosity. We also propose an improvement of the edge-based directional and chain code-based features. The proposed methods are applicable to Arabic and English handwriting. We have also studied several methods for computing the distance between feature vectors when comparing two writers. Evaluation of the methods is performed using both the IAM handwriting database and the QUWI database for each individual feature reaching Top1 identification rates of 82 and 87 % in those two datasets, respectively. The accuracies achieved by Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) are significantly higher than those observed before feature-level writer identification was implemented. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the improved versions of both chain-code features and edge-based directional features

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

Authorship Verification in Arabic using Function Words: A Controversial Case Study of Imam Ali's Book Peak of Eloquence

This paper addresses the viability of two multivariate methods (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) in verifying the disputed authorship of a famous Arabic religious book called (Nahjul-Balagha/ Peak of Eloquence). This book occupies an exceptional position in the history of the huge debates held between the two basic Islamic sectors: Sunni'e and Shia. Therefore, it represents a serious challenge to the viability of the multivariate techniques in resolving certain types of historical and sectarian conflicts and controversies. Furthermore, verifying the authorship of this book could be a good opportunity to find out whether there are certain quantitative techniques of attribution that hold for different languages such as English and Arabic. Function words have been targeted in this paper as possible indicators of the author's identity. Accordingly, a set of Arabic function words would be tested using WordSmith Tools (version 5). It turned out that the multivariate techniques are most likely robust for addressing the type of issues raised about Nahjul-Balagha. Besides, it appeared that the statistical patterns of function word usages are quite sensitive to genre in Arabic. Keywords: authorship attribution, authorship verification, stylometrics, computational stylistics

Writer Identification of Arabic Handwritten Digits

This paper addresses the identification of Arabic handwritten digits. In addition to digit identifiability, the paper presents digit recognition. The digit image is divided into grids based on the distribution of the black pixels in the image. Several types of features are extracted (viz. gradient, curvature, density, horizontal and vertical run lengths, stroke, and concavity features) from the grid segments. K-Nearest Neighbor and Nearest Mean classifiers are used. A database of 70000 of Arabic handwritten digit samples written by 700 writers is used in the analysis and experimentations. The identifiability of isolated and combined digits are tested. The analysis of the results indicates that Arabic digits 3 (٣), 4 (٤), 8 (٨), and 9 (٩) are more identifiable than other digits while Arabic digit 0 (٠) and 1 (١) are the least identifiable. In addition, the paper shows that combining the writer’s digits increases the discriminability power of Arabic handwritten digits. Combining the features of all digits, K-NN provided the best accuracy in text-independent writer identification with top-1 result of 88.14%, top-5 result of 94.81%, and top-10 results of 96.48%

A robust authorship attribution on big period

Authorship attribution is a task to identify the writer of unknown text and categorize it to known writer. Writing style of each author is distinct and can be used for the discrimination. There are different parameters responsible for rectifying such changes. When the writing samples collected for an author when it belongs to small period, it can participate efficiently for identification of unknown sample. In this paper author identification problem considered where writing sample is not available on the same time period. Such evidences collected over long period of time. And character n-gram, word n-gram and pos n-gram features used to build the model. As they are contributing towards style of writer in terms of content as well as statistic characteristic of writing style. We applied support vector machine algorithm for classification. Effective results and outcome came out from the experiments. While discriminating among multiple authors, corpus selection and construction were the most tedious task which was implemented effectively. It is observed that accuracy varied on feature type. Word and character n-gram have shown good accuracy than PoS n-gram

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

Ensemble methods for instance-based Arabic language authorship attribution

The Authorship Attribution (AA) is considered as a subfield of authorship analysis and it is an important problem as the range of anonymous information increased with fast growing of internet usage worldwide. In other languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese, such issue is quite well studied. However, in Arabic language, the AA problem has received less attention from the research community due to complexity and nature of Arabic sentences. The paper presented an intensive review on previous studies for Arabic language. Based on that, this study has employed the Technique for Order Preferences by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method to choose the base classifier of the ensemble methods. In terms of attribution features, hundreds of stylometric features and distinct words using several tools have been extracted. Then, Adaboost and Bagging ensemble methods have been applied on Arabic enquires (Fatwa) dataset. The findings showed an improvement of the effectiveness of the authorship attribution task in the Arabic language

Deep Adaptive Learning for Writer Identification based on Single Handwritten Word Images

There are two types of information in each handwritten word image: explicit information which can be easily read or derived directly, such as lexical content or word length, and implicit attributes such as the author's identity. Whether features learned by a neural network for one task can be used for another task remains an open question. In this paper, we present a deep adaptive learning method for writer identification based on single-word images using multi-task learning. An auxiliary task is added to the training process to enforce the emergence of reusable features. Our proposed method transfers the benefits of the learned features of a convolutional neural network from an auxiliary task such as explicit content recognition to the main task of writer identification in a single procedure. Specifically, we propose a new adaptive convolutional layer to exploit the learned deep features. A multi-task neural network with one or several adaptive convolutional layers is trained end-to-end, to exploit robust generic features for a specific main task, i.e., writer identification. Three auxiliary tasks, corresponding to three explicit attributes of handwritten word images (lexical content, word length and character attributes), are evaluated. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed deep adaptive learning method can improve the performance of writer identification based on single-word images, compared to non-adaptive and simple linear-adaptive approaches.Comment: Under view of Pattern Recognitio

Computational behavioral analytics: estimating psychological traits in foreign languages.

The rise of technology proliferating into the workplace has increased the threat of loss of intellectual property, classified, and proprietary information for companies, governments, and academics. This can cause economic damage to the creators of new IP, companies, and whole economies. This technology proliferation has also assisted terror groups and lone wolf actors in pushing their message to a larger audience or finding similar tribal groups that share common, sometimes flawed, beliefs across various social media platforms. These types of challenges have created numerous studies in psycholinguistics, as well as commercial tools, that look to assist in identifying potential threats before they have an opportunity to conduct malicious acts. This has led to an area of study that this dissertation defines as ``Computational Behavioral Analytics. A common practice espoused in various Natural Language Processing studies (both commercial and academic) conducted on foreign language text is the use of Machine Translation (MT) systems before conducting NLP tasks. In this dissertation, we explore three psycholinguistic traits conducted on foreign language text. We explore the effects (and failures) of MT systems in these types of psycholinguistic tasks in order to help push the field of study into a direction that will greatly improve the efficacy of such systems. Given the results of the experimentation in this dissertation, it is highly recommended to avoid the use of translations whenever the greatest levels of accuracy are necessary, such as for National Security and Law Enforcement purposes. If translations must be used for any reason, scientist should conduct a full analysis of the impact of their chosen translation system on their estimates to determine which traits are more significantly affected. This will help ensure that analysts and scientists are better informed of the potential inaccuracies and change any resulting decisions from the data accordingly. This dissertation introduces psycholinguistics and the benefits of using Machine Learning technologies in estimating various psychological traits, and provides a brief discussion on the potential privacy and legal issues that should be addressed in order to avoid the abuse of such systems in Chapter I. Chapter II outlines the datasets that are used during the experimentation and evaluation of the algorithms. Chapter III discusses each of the various implementations of the algorithms used in the three psycholinguistic tasks - Affect Analysis, Authorship Attribution, and Personality Estimation. Chapter IV discusses the experiments that were run in order to understand the effects of MT on the psycholinguistic tasks, and to understand how these tasks can be accomplished in the face of MT limitations, including rationale on the selection of the MT system used in this study. The dissertation concludes with Chapter V, providing a discussion and speculating on the findings and future experimentation that should be done