Authorship Attribution in Russian in Real-World Forensics Scenario

P. 299–310.

Panicheva P., Litvinova T.

Recent demands in authorship attribution, specifically, cross-topic authorship attribution with small numbers of training samples and very short texts, impose new challenges on corpora design, feature and algorithm development. In the current work we address these challenges by performing authorship attribution on a specifically designed dataset in Russian. We present a dataset of short written texts in Russian, where both authorship and topic are controlled. We propose a pairwise classification design closely resembling a real-world forensic task. Semantic coherence features are introduced to supplement well-established n-gram features in challenging cross-topic settings. Distance-based measures are compared with machine learning algorithms. The experiment results support the intuition that for very small datasets, distance-based measures perform better than machine learning techniques. Moreover, pairwise classification results show that in difficult cross-topic cases, content-independent features, i.e., part-of-speech n-grams and semantic coherence, are promising. The results are supported by feature significance analysis for the proposed dataset.

Keywords: Russian language, distributional semantics, Authorship identification, Plagiarism and spam filtering, Forensic authorship identification

In book

Statistical Language and Speech Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) Volume 11816 LNAI

Vol. 11816: Statistical Language and Speech Processing 7th International Conference, SLSP 2019, Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 14–16, 2019, Proceedings. , Springer Publishing Company, 2019.