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Authorship Analysis and Attribution

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Encyclopedia of Big Data

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Synonyms

Authorship profiling; Authorship verification; Stylistics; Stylometry

Introduction

Authorship attribution is a text classification technique used to infer the authorship of a document. By identifying features of writing style in a document and comparing it to features from other documents, a human analyst or a computer can make a determination of stylistic similarity and thus of the plausibility of authorship by any specific person. There are many applications, including education (plagiarism detection), forensic science (identifying the author of a piece of evidence such as a threatening letter), history (resolving questions of disputed works), and journalism (identifying the true authors behind pen names), among others.

Theory of Authorship Attribution

Human language is a complex system that is underconstrained, in the sense that there are normally many ways to express roughly the same idea. Writers and speakers are therefore forced to make (consciously or unconsciously)...

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Further Readings

  • Binongo, J. N. G. (2003). Who wrote the 15th book of Oz? An application of multivariate analysis to authorship attribution. Chance, 16, 9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Juola, P. (2008). Authorship attribution. Foundations and trends® in information retrieval, 1(3), 233–334.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Juola, P. (2015). The Rowling case: A proposed standard analytic protocol for authorship questions. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 30(Suppl. I), fqv040.

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  • Koppel, M., Schler, J., & Argamon, S. (2009). Computational methods in authorship attribution. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60(1), 9–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mosteller, F., & Wallace, D. L. (1963). Inference in an authorship problem: A comparative study of discrimination methods applied to the authorship of the disputed federalist papers. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58, 275.

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  • Stamatatos, E. (2009). A survey of modern authorship attribution methods. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60, 538.

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Patrick Juola

Authors
  1. Patrick Juola
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Correspondence to Patrick Juola .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Policy, Government and International Affairs, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Laurie A. Schintler

  2. School of Policy, Government and International Affairs, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Connie L. McNeely

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Juola, P. (2021). Authorship Analysis and Attribution. In: Schintler, L.A., McNeely, C.L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_522-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_522-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32001-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32001-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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