Authorship Attribution What Mixture-of-Experts Says We Don’t Yet Know.pptVIP

Authorship Attribution: What Mixture-of-Experts Says We Don’t Yet Know Patrick Juola Duquesne University Juola@ Authorship Attribution Inference of traits of author (identity, gender, socioeconomics, age, c) from writings Wide application: Linguistics History Literature “Forensics” c. Authorship Attribution Traditionally done by close reading Current research spurt in corpus-based and statistical methods. (“nontraditional”) E.g. Author #2 uses more prepositions than author #6 Effective, but theoretically ill-founded A realist’s view Improved corpora, improved computers, active community yield practical results Need Standardization of methods Standardization of problems Standardization of testbeds History of successful applications A realist’s view (cont.) Many methods work Which ones work the best? Many different applications Which applications will get impact? Need to tune tests, applications Need for explanatory capacity. A detective novel is unsatisfying if you don’t understand the sleuth “Stylome” [van Halteren] Handwriting analysis -- assumes people have persistent, uncontrollable habits of penmanship “Authorship attribution” -- assumes people have persistent, uncontrollable habits of thought and/or phrasing This assumption needs testing, specification, and validation AAAC Ad-hoc Authorship Attribution Contest (Juola, ACH/ALLC 2004) June, 2004, Gothenberg, Sweden Compare “professional ad-hocracy” of methods using controlled corpus Establish set of effective methods 13 problems in various lg. genres (see Juola, 2006; Juola, 2008 for details) Results (1) Problems admittedly difficult Problem F (Paston letters) -- Middle English letters, 1000 words Problem A,M (essays) -- fixed topics, homogenous writers, 1500 words Results nevertheless very good (Schler) 71%; (Keselj) 69%; (Juola) 65% Simple lexical statistics not very good Results (2) Language independent English/non-English correlation 0.5938 (p 0.05) May be size-