English

Boosting word frequencies in authorship attribution

Computation and Language 2023-03-30 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce a simple method of computing relative word frequencies for authorship attribution and similar stylometric tasks. Rather than computing relative frequencies as the number of occurrences of a given word divided by the total number of tokens in a text, I argue that a more efficient normalization factor is the total number of relevant tokens only. The notion of relevant words includes synonyms and, usually, a few dozen other words in some ways semantically similar to a word in question. To determine such a semantic background, one of word embedding models can be used. The proposed method outperforms classical most-frequent-word approaches substantially, usually by a few percentage points depending on the input settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.01289,
  title  = {Boosting word frequencies in authorship attribution},
  author = {Maciej Eder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.01289},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:02:18.547Z