Authorship Attribution of Texts: A Review

Abstract

We survey the authorship attribution of documents given some prior stylistic characteristics of the author’s writing extracted from a corpus of known works, e.g., authentication of disputed documents or literary works. Although the pioneering paper based on word length histograms appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century, the resolution power of this and other stylometry approaches is yet to be studied both theoretically and on case studies such that additional information can assist finding the correct attribution.

We survey several theoretical approaches including ones approximating the apparently nearly optimal one based on Kolmogorov conditional complexity and some case studies: attributing Shakespeare canon and newly discovered works as well as allegedly M. Twain’s newly-discovered works, Federalist papers binary (Madison vs. Hamilton) discrimination using Naive Bayes and other classifiers, and steganography presence testing. The latter topic is complemented by a sketch of an anagrams ambiguity study based on the Shannon cryptography theory.