A Prototype for Authorship Attribution Studies

Despite a century of research, statistical and computationalmethods for authorship attribution are neither reliable, well-regarded,widely used, or well-understood. This article presents a surveyof the current state of the art as well as a framework for uniformand unified development of a tool to apply the state of theart, despite the wide variety of methods and techniques used.The usefulness of the framework is confirmed by the developmentof a tool using that framework that can be applied to authorshipanalysis by researchers without a computing specialization.Using this tool, it may be possible both to expand the poolof available researchers as well as to enhance the quality ofthe overall solutions [for example, by incorporating improvedalgorithms as discovered through empirical analysis (Juola,P. (2004a). Ad-hoc Authorship Attribution Competition. In Proceedings2004 Joint International Conference of the Association for Literaryand Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers andthe Humanities (ALLC/ACH 2004), Göteborg, Sweden)].