Using relative entropy for authorship attribution

Abstract

Authorship attribution is the task of deciding who wrote a particular document. Several attribution approaches have been proposed in recent research, but none of these approaches is particularly satisfactory; some of them are ad hoc and most have defects in terms of scalability, effectiveness, and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a principled approach motivated from information theory to identify authors based on elements of writing style. We make use of the Kullback-Leibler divergence, a measure of how different two distributions are, and explore several different approaches to tokenizing documents to extract style markers. We use several data collections to examine the performance of ..