@inproceedings{zeng-etal-2025-residualized,
    title = "Residualized Similarity for Faithfully Explainable Authorship Verification",
    author = "Zeng, Peter  and
      Alipoormolabashi, Pegah  and
      Mun, Jihu  and
      Dey, Gourab  and
      Soni, Nikita  and
      Balasubramanian, Niranjan  and
      Rambow, Owen  and
      Schwartz, H.",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.856/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.856",
    pages = "15824--15837",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Responsible use of Authorship Verification (AV) systems not only requires high accuracy but also interpretable solutions. More importantly, for systems to be used to make decisions with real-world consequences requires the model{'}s prediction to be explainable using interpretable features that can be traced to the original texts. Neural methods achieve high accuracies, but their representations lack direct interpretability. Furthermore, LLM predictions cannot be explained faithfully {--} if there is an explanation given for a prediction, it doesn{'}t represent the reasoning process behind the model{'}s prediction. In this paper, we introduce Residualized Similarity (RS), a novel method that supplements systems using interpretable features with a neural network to improve their performance while maintaining interpretability. Authorship verification is fundamentally a similarity task, where the goal is to measure how alike two documents are. The key idea is to use the neural network to predict a similarity residual, i.e. the error in the similarity predicted by the interpretable system. Our evaluation across four datasets shows that not only can we match the performance of state-of-the-art authorship verification models, but we can show how and to what degree the final prediction is faithful and interpretable."
}