Author Masking by Sentence Transformation

Masking the writing style of an author has been useful and used by novelists for the purpose of passing unnoticed, as well as by people who aim to give information without being linked to it. Within the PAN evaluation framework, it is presented the task of paraphrasing or changing the writing style of a document, maintaining the topic that is being discussed. We propose a method that performs transformations in sentences, with an unsupervised approach, i.e., without previous data of the author or linguistic characteristics of a document collection. We make syntactic and semantic changes using dictionaries and semantic resources, as well as syntactic rules for sentence simplification. In the evaluation section, we will expose the observed strengths and weaknesses of the proposal.