An experiment in authorship attribution

This paper reports an experiment in authorship attribution that reveals considerable authorial structure in texts written by authors with very similar background and training, with genre and topic being strictly controlled for. We interpret our results as supporting the hypothesis that authors have ’textual fingerprints’, at least for texts produced by authors who are not consciously changing their style of writing across texts. What this study has also taught us is that discriminant analysis is a more appropriate technique to use than principal components analysis when predicting the authorship of an unknown (held-out) text on the basis of known (training) texts of which the authorial provenance is available. Finally, standard discriminant analysis can be enhanced considerably by using an entropy-based weighting scheme of the kind used in latent semantic analysis (Landauer et al., 1998).