Sentiment Polarity as a Stylistic Feature for Attribution of English Prose

Abstract

In this paper, we expand our exploration the usefulness of sentiment polarity as a stylistic feature for authorship attribution. We briefly describe our methodology and present the results from experiments using three English prose corpora. A comparison with attribution performed using traditional stylistic features on the same corpora is presented along with a brief comparison with prior results on sentiment-polarity-based attribution of poetry. We point out some limitations of our methodology and outline directions for further research.