Approaching authorship attribution as a multi-view supervised learning task

Abstract

Authorship attribution is the problem of identifying the author of texts based on the author's writing style. It is usually assumed that the writing style contains traits inaccessible to conscious manipulation and can thus be safely used to identify the author of a text. Several style markers have been proposed in the literature, nevertheless, there is still no consensus on which best represent the choices of authors. Here we assume an agnostic viewpoint on the dispute for the best set of features that represents an author's writing style. We rather investigate how different sources of information may unveil different aspects of an author's style, complementing each other to improve the overall process of authorship attribution. For this we model authorship attribution as a multi-view learning task. We assess the effectiveness of our proposal applying it to a set of well-studied corpora. We compare the performance of our proposal to the state-of-the-art approaches for authorship attribution. We thoroughly analyze how the multi-view approach improves on methods that use a single data source. We confirm that our approach improves both in accuracy and consistency of the methods and discuss how these improvements are beneficial for linguists and domain specialists.