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Showing 2 results for Authorship Attribution
Arash Poorakbar,
Volume 9, Issue 35 (10-2016)
Abstract
Rasā’el are the six prose pieces by Sa’dî which are usually published in his oeuvre. Since the first attempts to publish the scientific edition of his oeuvre, the question of these writing’s authorship was central to the topic. Different researchers have done some study on these six treatises and given some answers to the problem of their authorship attribution. It is meant in this dissertation, to quantitatively analyze the Rasā’el using stylometry and authorship attribution techniques and compare it with Golestān - the known work of Sa’dî. We have used two different techniques to do our analysis. The first technique used is characteristic curves proposed by Mendenhall. The second is a quantitative model to explain the repetition and distribution of vocabulary in each piece of writing. Ultimately, our answers fit with the Forughî’s guess about these writings. Three of these writings (Nasîhat ul muluk, Aql o eshq, and ankîyāno) are surely written by Sa’dî. Taqrîrāt-e salāse and dar taqrîr-e dîbāche are not written by Sa’dî. Majāles-e panjgāne’s author isn’t Sa’dî, but it is possible that the content is Sa’dî’s speeches for people.
Volume 10, Issue 3 (7-2019)
Abstract
The problem of discovering the identity of anonymous authors has engaged humans' attention during the ages. In present times, with the revolution brought about by digital computing and electronic corpora, and also with the applications made available by stylometry research in forensic linguistics, systematic analysis of texts in different languages has expanded the understanding of researchers on the different aspects of linguistic styles.
In the present study, the possibility of authorship attribution based on idiolect has been investigated in Farsi. One of the linguistic elements that is claimed to be the seat for idiolect is function words. Function words have been the focus of attention in the authorship attribution research since it has been shown that they are processed unconsciously, have high frequency in texts, and remain independent of text topic. In this paper, the possibility of differentiating texts written by different authors has been studied using Farsi function words. The research questions were: 1) Are Farsi functions words capable of differentiating authors in Farsi prose? 2) Of monograms, bigrams, and trigrams, which one is the most efficient in differentiating author styles? 3) What is the minimum cut-off point for successful differentiation of author styles in Farsi?
First, a corpus of five Iranian scholars’ writings was compiled, normalized and divided into different sample texts. Then 20 most frequent words were extracted from different author samples and n-gram sequences (up to tri-grams) were analyzed using principal component analysis and cluster analysis in the Stylo package of R.
Findings showed that function words in Farsi were capable of differentiating authors’ writings with monogram words performing better than bi-gram and tri-grams in small size samples. Findings also indicated that under the experimental conditions used in this study, the minimum number of words for a text to be successfully attributed to an author is about 4000 words. This cut-off point is reached using 20 most frequent function words. It is concluded that different authors don't use function words in the same manner. In fact, while some high-frequency function words appear in the writings of all authors, they are given different priorities by different authors.