A Multi-Dictionary Approach to Abstractness/Concreteness-Based Authorship Attribution

Abstract

We present some early results from a research project aimed at exploring the usefulness of abstractness/concreteness as stylistic features for authorship attribution. We conjecture that authors use abstract/concrete words and phrases in suf- ficiently unique ways, so that machine learning classifiers can learn to distinguish the individual authors’ writing styles. Our approach is based on using the abstractness rat- ings of words and phrases from texts with established au- thorship to generate training vectors for different machine learning classifiers. The combined word/phrase ratings are extracted from two separate abstractness dictionaries – an approach that yields stronger results than using single ab- stractness dictionaries. The paper describes the details of our methodology and compares the results to those obtained using traditional authorship attribution stylistic features. The limitations of our current methodology and directions for further research are outlined at the end of the paper.