The Million Authors Corpus: A Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Wikipedia Dataset for Authorship Verification

Abraham Israeli, Shuai Liu, Jonathan May, David Jurgens


Abstract
Authorship verification (AV) is a crucial task for applications like identity verification, plagiarism detection, and AI-generated text identification. However, datasets for training and evaluating AV models are primarily in English and primarily in a single domain. This precludes analysis of AV techniques for generalizability and can cause seemingly valid AV solutions to, in fact, rely on topic-based features rather than actual authorship features. To address this limitation, we introduce the Million Authors Corpus (), a novel dataset encompassing contributions from dozens of languages on Wikipedia. It includes only long and contiguous textual chunks taken from Wikipedia edits and links those texts to their authors. includes 60.08M textual chunks, contributed by 1.29M Wikipedia authors. It enables broad-scale cross-lingual and cross-domain AV evaluation to ensure accurate analysis of model capabilities that are not overly optimistic. We provide baseline evaluations using state-of-the-art AV models as well as information retrieval models that are not AV-specific in order to demonstrate ‘s unique cross-lingual and cross-domain ablation capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1335
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venues:
Findings | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25997–26017
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1335/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abraham Israeli, Shuai Liu, Jonathan May, and David Jurgens. 2025. The Million Authors Corpus: A Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Wikipedia Dataset for Authorship Verification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 25997–26017, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Million Authors Corpus: A Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Wikipedia Dataset for Authorship Verification (Israeli et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.findings-acl.1335.pdf