A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution

Zhengmian Hu, Tong Zheng, Heng Huang


Abstract
Authorship attribution aims to identify the origin or author of a document. Traditional approaches have heavily relied on manual features and fail to capture long-range correlations, limiting their effectiveness. Recent advancements leverage text embeddings from pre-trained language models, which require significant fine-tuning on labeled data, posing challenges in data dependency and limited interpretability. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their deep reasoning capabilities and ability to maintain long-range textual associations, offer a promising alternative. This study explores the potential of pre-trained LLMs in one-shot authorship attribution, specifically utilizing Bayesian approaches and probability outputs of LLMs. Our methodology calculates the probability that a text entails previous writings of an author, reflecting a more nuanced understanding of authorship. By utilizing only pre-trained models such as Llama-3-70B, our results on the IMDb and blog datasets show an impressive 85% accuracy in one-shot authorship classification across ten authors. Our findings set new baselines for one-shot authorship analysis using LLMs and expand the application scope of these models in forensic linguistics. This work also includes extensive ablation studies to validate our approach.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.733
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13216–13227
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.emnlp-main.733/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.733
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhengmian Hu, Tong Zheng, and Heng Huang. 2024. A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 13216–13227, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution (Hu et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.emnlp-main.733.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.733.software.zip