Authorship Analysis in Forensic Linguistics: History, Conception and Methodological Review. Application of the Likelihood Ratio to Short Texts in Spanish

Abstract

Authorship analysis refers to all those techniques aiming at determining who has written a certain text. In recent years, there has been a big development of this type of works, leading to a quick development of the discipline. This paper defines its origin and current situation, identifies its fields of application, and outlines its current methodological foundations. In this respect, the Likelihood Ratio is an appropriate approach to show the strength of the evidence in forensic sciences. This study builds a small corpus of short electronic texts and shows main issues to be resolved for its correct application: the selection of features, the appropriate characterization of an author's style based on them, and the calculation of probabilities and their interpretation.