Author profiling is the analysis of a given set of texts in an attempt to uncover various characteristics of the author based on stylistic- and content-based features, or to identify the author. Characteristics analysed commonly include age and gender, though more recent studies have looked at other characteristics like personality traits and occupation[1]
Author profiling is one of the three major fields in automatic authorship identification (AAI), the other two being authorship attribution and authorship identification. The process of AAI emerged at the end of the 19th century. Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, an American autodidact physicist and meteorologist, was the first to apply this process to the works of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlowe. From these three historic figures, Mendenhall sought to uncover their quantitative stylistic differences by inspecting word lengths.[2]
Although much progress has been made in the 21st century, the task of author profiling remains an unsolved problem due to its difficulty.
- ^ Wiegmann, M., Stein, B. & Potthast, M. (2019). "Overview of the Celebrity Profiling Task at PAN 2019." CLEF.
- ^ Mikros, G.K., & Perifanos, K. (2013). "Authorship attribution in Greek tweets using author's multilevel n-gram profiles." 2013 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.