A profile-based method for authorship verification

Abstract

Authorship verification is one of the most challenging tasks in style-based text categorization. Given a set of documents, all by the same author, and another document of unknown authorship the question is whether or not the latter is also by that author. Recently, in the framework of the PAN-2013 evaluation lab, a competition in authorship verification was organized and the vast majority of submitted approaches, including the best performing models, followed the instance-based paradigm where each text sample by one author is treated separately. In this paper, we show that the profile-based paradigm (where all samples by one author are treated cumulatively) can be very effective surpassing the performance of PAN-2013 winners without using any information from external sources. The proposed approach is fully-trainable and we demonstrate an appropriate tuning of parameter settings for PAN-2013 corpora achieving accurate answers especially when the cost of false negatives is high. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.