Recent Trends in Digital Text Forensics and Its Evaluation

Abstract

This paper outlines the concepts and achievements of our evaluation lab on digital text forensics, PAN 13, which called for original research and development on plagiarism detection, author identification, and author profiling. We present a standardized evaluation framework for each of the three tasks and discuss the evaluation results of the altogether 58 submitted contributions. For the first time, instead of accepting the output of software runs, we collected the softwares themselves and run them on a computer cluster at our site. As evaluation and experimentation platform we use TIRA, which is being developed at the Webis Group in Weimar. TIRA can handle large-scale software submissions by means of virtualization, sandboxed execution, tailored unit testing, and staged submission. In addition to the achieved evaluation results, a major achievement of our lab is that we now have the largest collection of state-of-the-art approaches with regard to the mentioned tasks for further analysis at our disposal.