Authorship Identification of Electronic Texts

Electronic text stylometry is concerned with analyzing the writing styles of input electronic texts to extract information about their authors. For example, such extracted data could be the authors’ identity or other aspects, such as their gender and age group. This survey paper presents the following contributions: 1) A description of all stylometry problems in probability terms, under a unified notation. 2) A survey of data representation (or feature extraction) methods. 3) A comprehensive evaluation of 23, 760 feature extraction methods followed by a thorough discussion of the results. This extensive evaluation is critical since the known data representation methods are often not evaluated under the same unified testbed.