Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology
  

Online Version - Last Updated - 20 Jan 2012

 

 
Home
 

 
Procedures and Resources for Authors

 
Information and Resources for Volume Editors
 

 
Orders and Subscriptions
 

 
Published Articles

 
Upcoming Volumes
 

 
Contact Us
 

 
Useful External Links
 

 
CRPIT Site Search
 
    

Searching With Style: Authorship Attribution in Classic Literature

Zhao, Y. and Zobel, J.

    It is a truism of literature that certain authors have a highly recognizable style. The concept of style underlies the authorship attribution techniques that have been applied to tasks such as identifying which of several authors wrote a particular news article. In this paper, we explore whether the works of authors of classic literature can be correctly identified with either of two approaches to attribution, using a collection of 634 texts by 55 authors. Our results show that these methods can be highly accurate, with errors primarily for authors where it might be argued that style is lacking. And did Marlowe write the works of Shakespeare? Our preliminary evidence suggests not.
Cite as: Zhao, Y. and Zobel, J. (2007). Searching With Style: Authorship Attribution in Classic Literature. In Proc. Thirtieth Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC2007), Ballarat Australia. CRPIT, 62. Dobbie, G., Ed. ACS. 59-68.
pdf (from crpit.com) pdf (local if available) BibTeX EndNote GS
 

 

ACS Logo© Copyright Australian Computer Society Inc. 2001-2014.
Comments should be sent to the webmaster at crpit@scem.uws.edu.au.
This page last updated 16 Nov 2007