Unit 10: Review

Review activities

Activity 1: Basic authorship vocabulary

Work alone, in pairs or threes. Explain the following terms.

1. authorship analysis
2. authorship attribution
3. authorship profiling
4. authorship verification

Activity 2: Comparison and constrast of basic authorship terms

Work alone, in pairs or threes. Explain the differences between the following terms.

1. authorship attribution vs. authorship profiling
2. similarity detection vs. authorship attribution
3. authorship profiling vs. authorship analysis
4. authorship attribution vs. authorship verification

Activity 3: Classification and categorization

Work alone, in pairs or threes. For each of the following scenarios, decide whether the task is text classification or text categorization.

1. There is a questioned letter. The letter was either written by the wife or the husband. Authorship analysis showed the author was most likely the husband.
2. A letter was discovered. The author of the letter is unknown. Authorship analysis showed the letter was most likely written by a young man who did not graduate high school.
3. A male university student submitted a essay. The professor wanted to check if the student wrote the essay himself. Authorship analysis showed that the student most likely wrote the essay.

For each of the above scenarios, decide whether the task is authorship verification, profiling or attribution.

Activity 4: Stylometry

Work alone, in pairs or threes. Answer the following questions.

1. What are the four types of features commonly used in stylometry?
2. Can you provide two examples for each of the types?
3. What is the name of the R package that can be used for stylometric analysis?

Activity 5: Authorship analysis

Work alone, in pairs or threes. Answer the following questions.

1. What are the three factors that make authorship analysis difficult?
2. In the expression "To be or not to be.", how many words, tokens and types are there?
3. Can you explain why in English we say heavy rain but not hard rain?

Master list

Activity 6: Vocabulary

This list contains of the important technical terms related to authorship analysis. The terms are grouped by the unit in which they were introduced.

Work alone, in pairs or groups. Describe, explain and provide examples for each of these terms.

1. authorship
2. analysis
3. attribution
4. genre
5. borrowed language
6. idiosyncratic language
7. punctuation
8. spelling
9. vocabulary
10. markers
11. text
12. questioned text
13. known text
14. authentic
15. counterfeit
16. collocation


17. profiling
18. forgery (to forge)
19. attribution
20. authorship verification
21. similarity detection
22. disputed
23. anonymous
24. plagiarism
25. text categorization
26. text classification
27. judge
28. jury
29. machine learning
30. support vector machine
31. black-box model
32. white-box model
33. stylometry
34. lexical features
35. syntactic features
36. structural features
37. content-specific features


38. token
39. non-word token
40. word token
41. type
42. part of speech
43. POS tag
44. combination
45. permutation


46. idiolect
47. Stylo
48. dendrogram
49. cluster analysis
50. multidimensional scaling
51. letter case
52. upper case
53. lower case
54. capital letters


55. n-gram
56. unigram
57. bigram
58. trigram


59. needle in the haystack
60. lexical density