A Prototype for Authorship Attribution Studies

Despite a century of research, statistical and computational methods for authorship attribution are neither reliable, well-regarded, widely-used, or well-understood. This paper presents a survey of the current state-of- the-art as well as a framework for uniform and unified development of a tool to apply the state-of-the-art, despite the wide variety of methods and techniques used. The usefulness of the framework is confirmed by the development of a tool using that framework that can be applied to authorship analysis by researchers without a computing specialization. Using this tool, it may be possible both to expand the pool of available researchers as well as to enhance the quality of the overall solutions (for example, by incorporating improved algorithms as discovered through em- pirical analysis (Juola, 2004a)).