Patterns of local discourse coherence as a feature for authorship attribution

A model of discourse coherence based on Barzilay and Lapata’s entity grids as a stylometric feature for authorship attribution is defined and tested against and in combination with standard features on nineteen booklength texts by nine nineteenth-century authors.

Abstract

We define a model of discourse coherence based on Barzilay and Lapata’s entity grids as a stylometric feature for authorship attribution. Unlike standard lexical and character-level features, it operates at a discourse (cross-sentence) level. We test it against and in combination with standard features on nineteen book-length texts by nine nineteenth-century authors. We find that coherence alone performs often as well as and sometimes better than standard features, though a combination of the two has the highest performance overall. We observe that despite the difference in levels, there is a correlation in performance of the two kinds of features.