Cross-Genre Authorship Verification Using Unmasking

Abstract

In this paper we will stress-test a recently proposed technique for computational authorship verification, ‘‘unmasking'', which has been well received in the literature. The technique envisages an experimental set-up commonly referred to as ‘‘authorship verification'', a task generally deemed more difficult than so-called ‘‘authorship attribution''. We will apply the technique to authorship verification across genres, an extremely complex text categorization problem that so far has remained unexplored. We focus on five representative contemporary English-language authors. For each of them, the corpus under scrutiny contains several texts in two genres (literary prose and theatre plays). Our research confirms that unmasking is an interesting technique for computational authorship verification, especially yielding reliable results within the genre of (larger) prose works in our corpus. Authorship verification, however, proves much more difficult in the theatrical part of the corpus.