Overview of the Author Identification Task at PAN-2017: Style Breach Detection and Author Clustering

Several authorship analysis tasks require the decomposition of a multiauthored text into its authorial components. In this regard two basic prerequisites need to be addressed: (1) style breach detection, i.e., the segmenting of a text into stylistically homogeneous parts, and (2) author clustering, i.e., the grouping of paragraph-length texts by authorship. In the current edition of PAN we focus on these two unsupervised authorship analysis tasks and provide both benchmark data and an evaluation framework to compare different approaches. We received three submissions for the style breach detection task and six submissions for the author clustering task; we analyze the submissions with different baselines while highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.