Delta vs. N-Gram Tracing: Evaluating the Robustness of Authorship Attribution Methods

Abstract

Delta measures are a well-established and popular family of authorship attribution methods, especially for literary texts. N-gram tracing is a novel method for authorship attribution designed for very short texts, which has its roots in forensic linguistics. We evaluate the performance of both methods in a series of experiments on English, French and German literary texts, in order to investigate the relationship between authorship attribution accuracy and text length as well as the composition of the comparison corpus. Our results show that, at least in our setting, both methods require relatively long texts and are furthermore highly sensitive to the choice of authors and texts in the comparison corpus.

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