Not all character N-grams are created equal: A study in authorship attribution

Upendra Sapkota, Steven Bethard, Manuel Montes-Y-Gómez, Thamar Solorio

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

147 Scopus citations

Abstract

Character n-grams have been identified as the most successful feature in both singledomain and cross-domain Authorship Attribution (AA), but the reasons for their discriminative value were not fully understood. We identify subgroups of character n-grams that correspond to linguistic aspects commonly claimed to be covered by these features: morphosyntax, thematic content and style. We evaluate the predictiveness of each of these groups in two AA settings: a single domain setting and a cross-domain setting where multiple topics are present. We demonstrate that character ngrams that capture information about affixes and punctuation account for almost all of the power of character n-grams as features. Our study contributes new insights into the use of n-grams for future AA work and other classification tasks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages93-102
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781941643495
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes
EventConference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015 - Denver, United States
Duration: May 31 2015Jun 5 2015

Publication series

NameNAACL HLT 2015 - 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Other

OtherConference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period5/31/156/5/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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