Performance of authorship attribution classifiers with short texts: application of religious Arabic fatwas

Abstract

Although authorship attribution is a well-known problem in authorship analysis domain, researches on Arabic contexts are still limited. In addition, examining the performance of the attribution methods on training set with short textual documents is also not considered well in other languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish and Dutch. Therefore, this current work aims at examining the performance of attribution classifiers in the context of short Arabic textual documents. The experimental part of this work is conducted with well-known classifiers namely: decision tree C4.5 method, naive Bayes model, K-NN method, Markov model, SMO and Burrows Delta method. We experiment with various features combination. The results show that combining the word-based lexical features with the structural features yields the best accuracy. At this end, we use this combination as a baseline for further investigation. We also examine the effect of combining the n-gram features. The results indicate that some classifiers show an improvement while the others do not. In addition, the results show that the naive Bayes method gives the highest accuracy among all the attribution classifiers.