Pastiche Detection Based on Stopword Rankings. Exposing Impersonators of a Romanian Writer

We applied hierarchical clustering using Rank distance, previously used in computational stylometry, on literary texts written by Mateiu Caragiale and a number of different authors who attempted to impersonate Caragiale after his death, or simply to mimic his style. Their pastiches were consistently clustered opposite to the original work, thereby confirming the performance of the method and proposing an extension of the method from simple authorship attribution to the more complicated problem of pastiche detection. The novelty of our work is the use of frequency rankings of stopwords as features, showing that this idea yields good results for pastiche detection.