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Overview of PAN 2018

Author Identification, Author Profiling, and Author Obfuscation

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Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction (CLEF 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11018))

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://stackexchange.com, visited June 2018.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/radiolarian/AO3Scraper.

  3. 3.

    https://stackexchange.com, visited June 2018.

  4. 4.

    In the six editions of the author profiling shared task we have had respectively 21 (2013: age and gender identification [26]), 10 (2014: age and gender identification in different genre social media [24]), 22 (2015: age and gender identification and personality recognition in Twitter [23]), 22 (2016: cross-genre age and gender identification [28]), 22 (2017: gender and language variety identification [27], and 23 (2018: multimodal gender identification [25]) participating teams.

  5. 5.

    The search of “author profiling” raises 1,560 results in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/scholar?q=%22author+profiling%22.

  6. 6.

    From the 23 participants, 22 participated in Arabic and Spanish, and all of them in English. All of them approached the task with textual features, and 12 also used images.

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Acknowledgments

Our special thanks go to all of PAN’s participants, to Symanto Group (https://www.symanto.net/) for sponsoring PAN and to MeaningCloud (https://www.meaningcloud.com/) for sponsoring the author profiling shared task award. The work at the Universitat Politècnica de València was funded by the MINECO research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece

    Efstathios Stamatatos

  2. Autoritas Consulting S.A., Valencia, Spain

    Francisco Rangel

  3. PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Francisco Rangel & Paolo Rosso

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Michael Tschuggnall

  5. Web Technology and Information Systems, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Weimar, Germany

    Benno Stein

  6. University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Mike Kestemont

  7. Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Martin Potthast

Authors
  1. Efstathios Stamatatos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Efstathios Stamatatos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aix-Marseille University, Marseille Cedex 20, France

    Patrice Bellot

  2. Virtual University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia

    Chiraz Trabelsi

  3. Systèmes d’informations, Big Data et Rec, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de, Toulouse Cedex 04, France

    Josiane Mothe

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

    Fionn Murtagh

  5. DIRO, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Jian Yun Nie

  6. Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Laure Soulier

  7. Université d'Avignon et des Pays de, Avignon, France

    Eric SanJuan

  8. Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Padova, Italy

    Linda Cappellato

  9. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Nicola Ferro

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Stamatatos, E. et al. (2018). Overview of PAN 2018. In: Bellot, P., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11018. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98932-7_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98932-7_25

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