Cross-domain authorship attribution using pre-trained language models

Abstract

Authorship attribution attempts to identify the authors behind texts and has important applications mainly in cyber-security, digital humanities and social media analytics. An especially challenging but very realistic scenario is cross-domain attribution where texts of known authorship (training set) differ from texts of disputed authorship (test set) in topic or genre. In this paper, we modify a successful authorship verification approach based on a multi-headed neural network language model and combine it with pre-trained language models. Based on experiments on a controlled corpus covering several text genres where topic and genre is specifically controlled, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves very promising results. We also demonstrate the crucial effect of the normalization corpus in cross-domain attribution.