Unsupervised authorship attribution using feature selection and weighted cosine similarity

Abstract

This paper presents a computational model for the unsupervised authorship attribution task based on a traditional machine learning scheme. An improvement over the state of the art is achieved by comparing different feature selection methods on the PAN17 author clustering dataset. To achieve this improvement, specific pre-processing and features extraction methods were proposed, such as a method to separate tokens by type to assign them to only one category. Similarly, special characters are used as part of the punctuation marks to improve the result obtained when applying typed character n-grams. The Weighted cosine similarity measure is applied to improve the B 3 F-score by reducing the vector values where attributes are exclusive. This measure is used to define distances between documents, which later are occupied by the clustering algorithm to perform authorship attribution.