Authorship Attribution of Russian Forum Posts with Different Types of N-gram Features

Ch. 3. P. 9–14.

Litvinova T., Litvinova O., Panicheva P.

Authorship attribution is an important field in online security. Recently there have been numerous successful works in authorship attribution in various European languages. Character n-grams are reported to be the best choice in authorship attribution, as they encode both style and content information. We evaluate different types of character n-gram features in an authorship attribution task in a real-world noisy dataset of Russian forum posts. We also supplement them with a number of new simple n-gram features capturing syntactic and discourse patterns. We perform authorship attribution in a single-topic and a cross-topic setting, as the research question is whether character n-grams capture both style and content information. Our results show that character n-grams are indeed very successful in Russian forum post authorship attribution. However, there is no clear distinction of style and content n-grams, as the same types of n-grams work well for both single-topic and cross-topic settings. In our experiments the generalized simple n-gram features which reveals syntactic and discourse patterns were proved to be also very important in authorship attribution of short informal Russian texts. They represent a different kind of authorship information and are a successful addition to the character n-grams in authorship attribution of forum texts in the Russian language.

Keywords: Russian language, authorship attribution, n-gram, Extremist forum

In book

NLPIR 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval

ACM, 2019.