On Identifying Authors with Style

Abstract

Stylometry is the quantified (often statistical) analysis of author style as a set of (usually morphosyntactic) features expressed in several documents by the author. The focus of this paper is a task to which stylometry is often applied: authorship attribution, the question of identifying or confirming the author of a text based on the known body of work. We analyze a feature set previously introduced in the field, using a tool and corpus already available. Decomposing the set, we identify the features that seem to have contributed the most to accurate performance. In re-composing the set under different objectives - first, for English-only document sets, and then for possible multi-language use - we identify smaller sets of feature combinations that work well together in accurate performance. We then outline our continuing work based on the results we obtain.