An extensive study of authorship authentication of Arabic articles
International Journal of Web Information Systems
ISSN: 1744-0084
Article publication date: 18 April 2017
Abstract
Purpose
The authorship authentication (AA) problem is concerned with correctly attributing a text document to its corresponding author. Historically, this problem has been the focus of various studies focusing on the intuitive idea that each author has a unique style that can be captured using stylometric features (SF). Another approach to this problem, known as the bag-of-words (BOW) approach, uses keywords occurrences/frequencies in each document to identify its author. Unlike the first one, this approach is more language-independent. This paper aims to study and compare both approaches focusing on the Arabic language which is still largely understudied despite its importance.
Design/methodology/approach
Being a supervised learning problem, the authors start by collecting a very large data set of Arabic documents to be used for training and testing purposes. For the SF approach, they compute hundreds of SF, whereas, for the BOW approach, the popular term frequency-inverse document frequency technique is used. Both approaches are compared under various settings.
Findings
The results show that the SF approach, which is much cheaper to train, can generate more accurate results under most settings.
Practical implications
Numerous advantages of efficiently solving the AA problem are obtained in different fields of academia as well as the industry including literature, security, forensics, electronic markets and trading, etc. Another practical implication of this work is the public release of its sources. Specifically, some of the SF can be very useful for other problems such as sentiment analysis.
Originality/value
This is the first study of its kind to compare the SF and BOW approaches for authorship analysis of Arabic articles. Moreover, many of the computed SF are novel, while other features are inspired by the literature. As SF are language-dependent and most existing papers focus on English, extra effort must be invested to adapt such features to Arabic text.
Keywords
Citation
Al-Ayyoub, M., Alwajeeh, A. and Hmeidi, I. (2017), "An extensive study of authorship authentication of Arabic articles", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 85-104. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-03-2016-0011
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited