Machine learning-based authorship attribution using token n-grams and other time tested features

Abstract

Authorship Attribution is a process to determine and/or identify the author of a given text document. The relevance of this research area comes to the fore when two or more writers claim to be the prospective authors of an unidentified or anonymous text document or are unwilling to accept any authorship. This research work aims to utilize various Machine Learning techniques in order to solve the problem of author identification. In the proposed approach, a number of textual features such as Token n-grams, Stylometric features, bag-of-words and TF-IDF have been extracted. Experimentation has been performed on three datasets viz. Spooky Author Identification dataset, Reuter_50_50 dataset and Manual dataset with 3 different train-test split ratios viz. 80-20, 70-30 and 66.67-33.33. Models have been built and tested with supervised learning algorithms such as Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree and Random Forest. The proposed system yields promising results. For the Spooky dataset, the best accuracy score obtained is 84.14% with bag-of-words using Naïve Bayes classifier. The best accuracy score of 86.2% is computed for the Reuter_50_50 dataset with 2100 most frequent words when the classifier used is Support Vector Machine. For the Manual dataset, the best score of 96.67% is obtained using the Naïve Bayes Classification Model with both 5-fold and 10-fold cross validation when both syntactic features and 600 most frequent unigrams are used in combination.