Delta measures are a well-established and popular family of authorship attribution methods, especially for literary texts. N-gram tracing is a novel method for authorship attribution designed for very short texts, which has its roots in forensic linguistics. We evaluate the performance of both methods in a series of experiments on English, French and German literary texts, in order to investigate the relationship between authorship attribution accuracy and text length as well as the composition of the comparison corpus. Our results show that, at least in our setting, both methods require relatively long texts and are furthermore highly sensitive to the choice of authors and texts in the comparison corpus.
@InProceedings{PROISL18.835, author = {Thomas Proisl and Stefan Evert and Fotis Jannidis and Christof Schöch and Leonard Konle and Steffen Pielström}, title = "{Delta vs. N-Gram Tracing: Evaluating the Robustness of Authorship Attribution Methods}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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