Stylometry

Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language.[1] It has also been applied successfully to music,[2] paintings,[3] and chess.[4]

Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents.[5] It has legal as well as academic and literary applications, ranging from the question of the authorship of Shakespeare's works to forensic linguistics and has methodological similarities with the analysis of text readability.

Stylometry may be used to unmask pseudonymous or anonymous authors, or to reveal some information about the author short of a full identification. Authors may use adversarial stylometry to resist this identification by eliminating their own stylistic characteristics without changing the meaningful content of their communications. It can defeat analyses that do not account for its possibility, but the ultimate effectiveness of stylometry in an adversarial environment is uncertain: stylometric identification may not be reliable, but nor can non-identification be guaranteed; adversarial stylometry's practice itself may be detectable.

  1. ^ Argamon, Shlomo, Kevin Burns, and Shlomo Dubnov, eds. The structure of style: algorithmic approaches to understanding manner and meaning. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010.
  2. ^ Westcott, Richard (15 June 2006). "Making hit music into a science". BBC News.
  3. ^ Sethi, Ricky (2016-06-07). "Using computers to better understand art". The Conversation. Retrieved 2021-12-01.
  4. ^ McIlroy-Young, Reid; Wang, Yu; Sen, Siddhartha; Kleinberg, Jon; Anderson, Ashton (2021). Detecting Individual Decision-Making Style: Exploring Behavioral Stylometry in Chess. 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
  5. ^ Chen, Hsinchun; Yang, Christopher C.; Chau, Michael; Li, Shu-Hsing (2009). Intelligence and Security Informatics: Pacific Asia Workshop, PAISI 2009, Bangkok, Thailand, April 27, 2009. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. p. 15. ISBN 9783642013928.