Authorship Attribution of Micro-Messages

Work on authorship attribution has traditionally focused on long texts. In this work, we tackle the question of whether the author of a very short text can be successfully identified. We use Twitter as an experimental testbed. We introduce the concept of an author’s unique “signature”, and show that such signatures are typical of many authors when writing very short texts. We also present a new authorship attribution feature (“flexible patterns”) and demonstrate a significant improvement over our baselines. Our results show that the author of a single tweet can be identified with good accuracy in an array of flavors of the authorship attribution task.