Authorship attribution of SMS messages using an N-grams approach

The pervasive use of SMS is increasing the amount of digital evidence available on cellular phones. Consequently it has become important to detect SMS authors, as a post-hoc analysis technique deemed useful in criminal persecution cases. This paper investigates an N-grams based approach for determining the authorship of SMS messages. Despite the scarcity of words in SMS messages and the differences between SMS language and natural language characteristics, the chosen method shows encouraging results in identification of authors. In this paper the effects of the gram size and the similarity scoring technique on the prediction of SMS message authors are also examined.