Authorship Attribution of Essays Using Stylometry

Stylometry refers to the study of the unique linguistic styles and writing behaviours of individuals so as to determine authorship. It subsumes statistical methods for quantifying an author¿s unique writing style. By constructing and comparing stylometric models for different text segments, passages that are stylistically different from others, hence potentially plagiarized, can be detected. Stylometry uses pattern recognition, statistical analysis, and artificial intelligence techniques. It analyses the text in the documents or essays by using various parameters. These include the topic of the document and its content, for example word frequencies. It also identifies pattern in common parts of speech. Stylometry has its origin traced back to the mid-19th century where Augustus de Morgan, an English logician, suggested that word length could be an indicator of ownership. Later on in 1964, Mosteller and Wallace, two American statisticians, made an even bigger impact in this area when they decided to use word frequencies to investigate the mystery of the authorship of The Federal Papers.