The Computational-Linguistic Approach to Forensic Authorship Attribution

This article examines the diversity of methods in authorship attribution through a lens which focuses attention on a single common element. The current state of authorship attribution study is spread throughout so many academic and non -academic disciplines that it is nigh impossible to describe all of the various assumptions about language and authorship. The disciplines involved in authorship attributions range over Classics, Biblical exegesis, Paleography, Communication and Rhetoric, English literary criticism, Handwriting examination, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, and Machine Learning. Given the breadth of this list, it is no wonder that the current state of authorship attribution appears to be a jumbled mass of multiple contrasts.