Authorship Attribution Using Text Distortion

Authorship attribution is associated with important applications in forensics and humanities research. A crucial point in this field is to quantify the personal style of writing, ideally in a way that is not affected by changes in topic or genre. In this paper, we present a novel method that enhances authorship attribution effectiveness by introducing a text distortion step before extracting stylometric measures. The proposed method attempts to mask topicspecific information that is not related to the personal style of authors. Based on experiments on two main tasks in authorship attribution, closed-set attribution and authorship verification, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can enhance existing methods especially under cross-topic conditions, where the training and test corpora do not match in topic.