The Importance of Suppressing Domain Style in Authorship Analysis
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg（马丁·路德·哈勒-维滕贝格大学）；University of the Aegean（爱琴海大学）；Bauhaus-Universität Weimar（魏玛包豪斯大学）；Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）
Sebastian Bischoff, Niklas Deckers, Marcel Schliebs, Ben Thies, Matthias Hagen, Efstathios Stamatatos, Benno Stein, Martin Potthast
The prerequisite of many approaches to authorship analysis is a representation of writing style. But despite decades of research, it still remains unclear to what extent commonly used and widely accepted representations like character trigram frequencies actually represent an author's writing style, in contrast to more domain-specific style components or even topic. We address this shortcoming for the first time in a novel experimental setup of fixed authors but swapped domains between training and testing. With this setup, we reveal that approaches using character trigram features are highly susceptible to favor domain information when applied without attention to domains, suffering drops of up to 55.4 percentage points in classification accuracy under domain swapping. We further propose a new remedy based on domain-adversarial learning and compare it to ones from the literature based on heuristic rules. Both can work well, reducing accuracy losses under domain swapping to 3.6% and 3.9%, respectively.
With such increasing popularity and availability of digital text data, authorships of digital texts can not be taken for granted due to the ease of copying and parsing. This paper presents a new text style analysis called natural frequency zoned word distribution analysis (NFZ-WDA), and then a basic authorship attribution scheme and an open authorship attribution scheme for digital texts based on the analysis. NFZ-WDA is based on the observation that all authors leave distinct intrinsic word usage traces on texts written by them and these intrinsic styles can be identified and employed to anal…
Stylometry Analysis of Multi-authored Documents for Authorship and Author Style Change Detection
Abasyn University Islamabad Campus（阿巴辛大学伊斯兰堡校区）；University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar（白沙瓦工程技术大学）；National University of Science and Technology（国立科技大学）；University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）
Minds, Machines, and Society Group（心智、机器与社会研究组）；Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院计算机科学系）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
Authorship identification tasks, which rely heavily on linguistic styles, have always been an important part of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) research. While other tasks based on linguistic style understanding benefit from deep learning methods, these methods have not behaved as well as traditional machine learning methods in many authorship-based tasks. With these tasks becoming more and more challenging, however, traditional machine learning methods based on handcrafted feature sets are already approaching their performance limits. Thus, in order to inspire future applications of deep…
We describe a technique for attributing parts of a written text to a set of unknown authors. Nothing is assumed to be known a priori about the writing styles of potential authors. We use multiple independent clusterings of an input text to identify parts that are similar and dissimilar to one another. We describe algorithms necessary to combine the multiple clusterings into a meaningful output. We show results of the application of the technique on texts having multiple writing styles.
Writing style is a combination of consistent decisions associated with a specific author at different levels of language production, including lexical, syntactic, and structural. In this paper, we introduce a style-aware neural model to encode document information from three stylistic levels and evaluate it in the domain of authorship attribution. First, we propose a simple way to jointly encode syntactic and lexical representations of sentences. Subsequently, we employ an attention-based hierarchical neural network to encode the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences in documents while…
Authorship attribution is the problem of identifying the most plausible author of an anonymous text from a set of candidate authors. Researchers have investigated same-topic and cross-topic scenarios of authorship attribution, which differ according to whether new, unseen topics are used in the testing phase. However, neither scenario allows us to explain whether errors are caused by a failure to capture authorship writing style or by a topic shift. Motivated by this, we propose the \emph{topic confusion} task where we switch the author-topic configuration between the training and testing sets…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；University of Saskatchewan（萨斯喀彻温大学）
Authorship attribution (AA), which is the task of finding the owner of a given text, is an important and widely studied research topic with many applications. Recent works have shown that deep learning methods could achieve significant accuracy improvement for the AA task. Nevertheless, most of these proposed methods represent user posts using a single type of feature (e.g., word bi-grams) and adopt a text classification approach to address the task. Furthermore, these methods offer very limited explainability of the AA results. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing DeepStyl…
We present our approach for computer-aided social media text authorship attribution based on recent advances in short text authorship verification. We use various natural language techniques to create word-level and character-level models that act as hidden layers to simulate a simple neural network. The choice of word-level and character-level models in each layer was informed through validation performance. The output layer of our system uses an unweighted majority vote vector to arrive at a conclusion. We also considered writing bias in social media posts while collecting our training datas…
Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta（马耳他大学语言学与语言技术研究所）；Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学语言与认知中心）
Existing research on Authorship Attribution (AA) focuses on texts for which a lot of data is available (e.g novels), mainly in English. We approach AA via Authorship Verification on short Italian texts in two novel datasets, and analyze the interaction between genre, topic, gender and length. Results show that AV is feasible even with little data, but more evidence helps. Gender and topic can be indicative clues, and if not controlled for, they might overtake more specific aspects of personal style.
Authorship attribution, being an important problem in many areas in-cluding information retrieval, computational linguistics, law and journalism etc., has been identified as a subject of increasingly research interest in the re-cent years. In case of Author Identification task in PAN at CLEF 2015, the main focus was given on cross-genre and cross-topic author verification tasks. We have used several word-based and style-based features to identify the dif-ferences between the known and unknown problems of one given set and label the unknown ones accordingly using a Random Forest based classifie…
Ivan Franko Lviv National University（伊万·弗兰科利沃夫国立大学）
The use of naive Bayesian classifier (NB) and the classifier by the k nearest neighbors (kNN) in classification semantic analysis of authors' texts of English fiction has been analysed. The authors' works are considered in the vector space the basis of which is formed by the frequency characteristics of semantic fields of nouns and verbs. Highly precise classification of authors' texts in the vector space of semantic fields indicates about the presence of particular spheres of author's idiolect in this space which characterizes the individual author's style.
Halmstad University（哈尔姆斯塔德大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
In recent years, messages and text posted on the Internet are used in criminal investigations. Unfortunately, the authorship of many of them remains unknown. In some channels, the problem of establishing authorship may be even harder, since the length of digital texts is limited to a certain number of characters. In this work, we aim at identifying authors of tweet messages, which are limited to 280 characters. We evaluate popular features employed traditionally in authorship attribution which capture properties of the writing style at different levels. We use for our experiments a self-captur…
ChatGPT-generated texts show authorship traits that identify them as non-human
Università degli Studi di Pavia（帕维亚大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)（加泰罗尼亚高等研究院）
Abasyn University Islamabad Campus（阿巴辛大学伊斯兰堡校区）；Jeddah International College（吉达国际学院）；AJOU University（亚洲大学）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）
Style analysis, which is relatively a less explored topic, enables several interesting applications. For instance, it allows authors to adjust their writing style to produce a more coherent document in collaboration. Similarly, style analysis can also be used for document provenance and authentication as a primary step. In this paper, we propose an ensemble-based text-processing framework for the classification of single and multi-authored documents, which is one of the key tasks in style analysis. The proposed framework incorporates several state-of-the-art text classification algorithms incl…
Most of privacy protection studies for textual data focus on removing explicit sensitive identifiers. However, personal writing style, as a strong indicator of the authorship, is often neglected. Recent studies, such as SynTF, have shown promising results on privacy-preserving text mining. However, their anonymization algorithm can only output numeric term vectors which are difficult for the recipients to interpret. We propose a novel text generation model with a two-set exponential mechanism for authorship anonymization. By augmenting the semantic information through a REINFORCE training rewa…
Authorship analysis (AA) is the study of unveiling the hidden properties of authors from a body of exponentially exploding textual data. It extracts an author's identity and sociolinguistic characteristics based on the reflected writing styles in the text. It is an essential process for various areas, such as cybercrime investigation, psycholinguistics, political socialization, etc. However, most of the previous techniques critically depend on the manual feature engineering process. Consequently, the choice of feature set has been shown to be scenario- or dataset-dependent. In this paper, to m…
Writing style is a combination of consistent decisions at different levels of language production including lexical, syntactic, and structural associated to a specific author (or author groups). While lexical-based models have been widely explored in style-based text classification, relying on content makes the model less scalable when dealing with heterogeneous data comprised of various topics. On the other hand, syntactic models which are content-independent, are more robust against topic variance. In this paper, we introduce a syntactic recurrent neural network to encode the syntactic patte…
Syntactic structure of sentences in a document substantially informs about its authorial writing style. Sentence representation learning has been widely explored in recent years and it has been shown that it improves the generalization of different downstream tasks across many domains. Even though utilizing probing methods in several studies suggests that these learned contextual representations implicitly encode some amount of syntax, explicit syntactic information further improves the performance of deep neural models in the domain of authorship attribution. These observations have motivated…
Is AI Catching Up to Human Expression? Exploring Emotion, Personality, Authorship, and Linguistic Style in English and Arabic with Six Large Language Models
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University（计算机与信息科学学院，沙特阿拉伯国王沙德大学）
Authorship attribution aims to identify the author of a text based on the stylometric analysis. Authorship obfuscation, on the other hand, aims to protect against authorship attribution by modifying a text's style. In this paper, we evaluate the stealthiness of state-of-the-art authorship obfuscation methods under an adversarial threat model. An obfuscator is stealthy to the extent an adversary finds it challenging to detect whether or not a text modified by the obfuscator is obfuscated - a decision that is key to the adversary interested in authorship attribution. We show that the existing au…
An individual's variation in writing style is often a function of both social and personal attributes. While structured social variation has been extensively studied, e.g., gender based variation, far less is known about how to characterize individual styles due to their idiosyncratic nature. We introduce a new approach to studying idiolects through a massive cross-author comparison to identify and encode stylistic features. The neural model achieves strong performance at authorship identification on short texts and through an analogy-based probing task, showing that the learned representation…
Linguistic style is an integral component of language. Recent advances in the development of style representations have increasingly used training objectives from authorship verification (AV): Do two texts have the same author? The assumption underlying the AV training task (same author approximates same writing style) enables self-supervised and, thus, extensive training. However, a good performance on the AV task does not ensure good "general-purpose" style representations. For example, as the same author might typically write about certain topics, representations trained on AV might also en…
Overview of PAN 2026: Voight-Kampff Generative AI Detection, Text Watermarking, Multi-Author Writing Style Analysis, Generative Plagiarism Detection, and Reasoning Trajectory Detection
Friedrich Schiller University Jena（耶纳弗里德里希·施勒格尔大学）；University of Applied Sciences BFI（应用科学大学BFI）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（马尔代夫 bin Zayed 人工智能大学）；University of Kassel（卡塞尔大学）；INSAIT, Sofia University ``St. Kliment Ohridski''（INSAIT，索菲亚大学『圣克莱门特·奥赫里迪斯』）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
PAN 2026旨在通过客观评估推进计算风格学和文本取证，涵盖生成式AI检测、文本水印、多作者写作分析、抄袭检测及推理轨迹检测等五个新旧任务。
Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University（古鲁·戈宾德·辛格因德拉普拉斯塔大学）
The writing style of a person can be affirmed as a unique identity indicator; the words used, and the structuring of the sentences are clear measures which can identify the author of a specific work. Stylometry and its subset - Authorship Attribution, have a long history beginning from the 19th century, and we can still find their use in modern times. The emergence of the Internet has shifted the application of attribution studies towards non-standard texts that are comparatively shorter to and different from the long texts on which most research has been done. The aim of this paper focuses on…
Cochin University（科钦大学）；Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering and Technology（阿迪·商羯罗工程技术学院）
Authorship attribution mainly deals with undecided authorship of literary texts. Authorship attribution is useful in resolving issues like uncertain authorship, recognize authorship of unknown texts, spot plagiarism so on. Statistical methods can be used to set apart the approach of an author numerically. The basic methodologies that are made use in computational stylometry are word length, sentence length, vocabulary affluence, frequencies etc. Each author has an inborn style of writing, which is particular to himself. Statistical quantitative techniques can be used to differentiate the appro…
Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院核物理研究所）；Cracow University of Technology（克拉科夫理工大学）
By representing a text by a set of words and their co-occurrences, one obtains a word-adjacency network being a reduced representation of a given language sample. In this paper, the possibility of using network representation to extract information about individual language styles of literary texts is studied. By determining selected quantitative characteristics of the networks and applying machine learning algorithms, it is possible to distinguish between texts of different authors. Within the studied set of texts, English and Polish, a properly rescaled weighted clustering coefficients and w…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；AWS AI Research & Education（亚马逊云科技人工智能研究与教育部门）
Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the author of a given text. The key is finding representations that can differentiate between authors. Existing approaches typically use manually designed features that capture a dataset's content and style, but these approaches are dataset-dependent and yield inconsistent performance across corpora. In this work, we propose \textit{learning} author-specific representations by fine-tuning pre-trained generic language representations with a contrastive objective (Contra-X). We show that Contra-X learns representations that form highly separable …
