A survey of modern authorship attribution methods

Abstract Authorship attribution supported by statistical or computational methods has a long history starting from the 19th century and is marked by the seminal study of Mosteller and Wallace (1964) on the authorship of the disputed “Federalist Papers.” During the last decade, this scientific field has been developed substantially, taking advantage of research advances in areas such as machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing. The plethora of available electronic texts (e.g., e‐mail messages, online forum messages, blogs, source code, etc.) indicates a wide variety of applications of this technology, provided it is able to handle short and noisy text from multiple candidate…