Using frame semantics in authorship attribution

Authorship attribution is a stylometric technique that associates text to authors based on the type of writing styles. Researchers have looked for ways to analyze the context of these texts, in some cases with limited results. Most of the approaches view information at the syntactic and physical levels and tend to ignore information from the semantic levels. In this paper, we present a technique that incorporates the use of semantic frames as a method for authorship attribution. We hypothesize that it provides a deeper view into the semantic level of texts, which is an influencing factor in a writer's style. We use a variety of online resources in a pipeline fashion to extract information about frames within the text. The results show that our “bag of frames” approach can be used successfully for stylometry.

I. Introduction

Stylometry is a study of analyzing an author's writing based on content. One of the earliest studies in authorship attribution paved way for approaches to be applied by providing stylometric features on The Federalist papers [1], which many of these features are still being used. Stylometry could be further categorized into two types of problems: authorship verification and authorship attribution. Conceptually, authorship verification hypothesizes that a text snippet written by an author(s) can be verified if it was indeed written by the proposed author [2].