IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CAG$ </tex-math></inline-formula>: Stylometric Authorship Attribution of Multi-Author Documents Using a Co-Authorship Graph

  • Raheem Sarwar,
  • Norawit Urailertprasert,
  • Nattapol Vannaboot,
  • Chenyun Yu,
  • Thanawin Rakthanmanon,
  • Ekapol Chuangsuwanich,
  • Sarana Nutanong

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2967449
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 18374 – 18393

Abstract

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Stylometry has been successfully applied to perform authorship identification of single-author documents (AISD). The AISD task is concerned with identifying the original author of an anonymous document from a group of candidate authors. However, AISD techniques are not applicable to the authorship identification of multi-author documents (AIMD). Unlike AISD, where each document is written by one single author, AIMD focuses on handling multi-author documents. Due to the combinatoric nature of documents, AIMD lacks the ground truth information-that is, information on writing and non-writing authors in a multi-author document-which makes this problem more challenging to solve. Previous AIMD solutions have a number of limitations: (i) the best stylometry-based AIMD solution has a low accuracy, less than 30%; (ii) increasing the number of co-authors of papers adversely affects the performance of AIMD solutions; and (iii) AIMD solutions were not designed to handle the non-writing authors (NWAs). However, NWAs exist in real-world cases-that is, there are papers for which not every co-author listed has contributed as a writer. This paper proposes an AIMD framework called the Co-Authorship Graph that can be used to (i) capture the stylistic information of each author in a corpus of multi-author documents and (ii) make a multi-label prediction for a multi-author query document. We conducted extensive experimental studies on one synthetic and three real-world corpora. Experimental results show that our proposed framework (i) significantly outperformed competitive techniques; (ii) can effectively handle a larger number of co-authors in comparison with competitive techniques; and (iii) can effectively handle NWAs in multi-author documents.

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