A Visualizable Evidence-Driven Approach for Authorship Attribution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Internet provides an ideal anonymous channel for concealing computer-mediated malicious activities, as the network-based origins of critical electronic textual evidence (e.g., emails, blogs, forum posts, chat logs, etc.) can be easily repudiated. Authorship attribution is the study of identifying the actual author of the given anonymous documents based on the text itself, and for decades, many linguistic stylometry and computational techniques have been extensively studied for this purpose. However, most of the previous research emphasizes promoting the authorship attribution accuracy, and few works have been done for the purpose of constructing and visualizing the evidential traits. In addition, these sophisticated techniques are difficult for cyber investigators or linguistic experts to interpret. In this article, based on the End-to-End Digital Investigation (EEDI) framework, we propose a visualizable evidence-driven approach, namely VEA, which aims at facilitating the work of cyber investigation. Our comprehensive controlled experiment and the stratified experiment on the real-life Enron email dataset demonstrate that our approach can achieve even higher accuracy than traditional methods; meanwhile, its output can be easily visualized and interpreted as evidential traits. In addition to identifying the most plausible author of a given text, our approach also estimates the confidence for the predicted result based on a given identification context and presents visualizable linguistic evidence for each candidate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".