BertAA : BERT fine-tuning for Authorship Attribution

Maël Fabien, Esau Villatoro-Tello, Petr Motlicek, Shantipriya Parida

Abstract
Identifying the author of a given text can be useful in historical literature, plagiarism detection, or police investigations. Authorship Attribution (AA) has been well studied and mostly relies on a large feature engineering work. More recently, deep learning-based approaches have been explored for Authorship Attribution (AA). In this paper, we introduce BertAA, a fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT language model with an additional dense layer and a softmax activation to perform authorship classification. This approach reaches competitive performances on Enron Email, Blog Authorship, and IMDb (and IMDb62) datasets, up to 5.3% (relative) above current state-of-the-art approaches. We performed an exhaustive analysis allowing to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed method. In addition, we evaluate the impact of including additional features (e.g. stylometric and hybrid features) in an ensemble approach, improving the macro-averaged F1-Score by 2.7% (relative) on average.
Anthology ID:
2020.icon-main.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India
Editors:
Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Dipti Misra Sharma, Rajeev Sangal
Venue:
ICON
SIG:
Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
Note:
Pages:
127–137
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.icon-main.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maël Fabien, Esau Villatoro-Tello, Petr Motlicek, and Shantipriya Parida. 2020. BertAA : BERT fine-tuning for Authorship Attribution. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 127–137, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
BertAA : BERT fine-tuning for Authorship Attribution (Fabien et al., ICON 2020)
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