A case study in authorship attribution: The Mondrigo1

Abstract

In this paper, we present authorship attribution methods applied to ¡El Mondrigo! (1968), a controversial text supposedly created by order of the Mexican Government to defame a student strike. Up to now, although the authorship of the book has been attributed to several journalists and writers, it could not be demonstrated and remains an open problem. The work aims at establishing which one of the most commonly attributed writers is the real author. To do that, we implement methods based on stylometric features using textual distance, supervised, and unsupervised learning. The distance-based methods implemented in this work are Kilgarriff and Delta of Burrows, an SVM algorithm is used as the supervised method, and the k-means algorithm as the unsupervised algorithm. The applied methods were consistent by pointing out a single author as the most likely one.