Improving cross-topic authorship attribution: The role of pre-processing

Abstract

The effectiveness of character n-gram features for representing the stylistic properties of a text has been demonstrated in various independent Authorship Attribution (AA) studies. Moreover, it has been shown that some categories of character n-grams perform better than others both under single and cross-topic AA conditions. In this work, we present an improved algorithm for cross-topic AA. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of character n-grams representation can be significantly enhanced by performing simple pre-processing steps and appropriately tuning the number of features, especially in cross-topic conditions.