Detecting the real authors of books and papers

By Geoff Maslen. A decade-long project by researchers in Australia and Latvia has resulted in an automatic authorship detection system that has provided new evidence about who actually wrote two famous texts: the US Federalist Papers and Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.
The researchers say the system is now freely available for others to use and could be adapted for different types of text and for languages other than English.
Led by Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide’s school of electrical and electronic engineering, the six-member team used advanced software techniques to analyse author styles based on commonly used words and their frequencies in the text. Read more...