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Cited by 222Authorship Attribution and ProfilingUser Authentication and Security SystemsMental Health via Writing

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 195 of the 207 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Authorship Attribution for Social Media Forensics

Rocha, Anderson, Scheirer, Walter J., Forstall, Christopher W., Cavalcante, Thiago, Theophilo, Antonio, Shen, Bingyu, Carvalho, Ariadne R. B., Stamatatos, Efstathios·2017·IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
DOI 10.1109/tifs.2016.2603960
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Abstract

The veil of anonymity provided by smartphones with pre-paid SIM cards, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and distributed networks like Tor has drastically complicated the task of identifying users of social media during forensic investigations. In some cases, the text of a single posted message will be the only clue to an author's identity. How can we accurately predict who that author might be when the message may never exceed 140 characters on a service like Twitter? For the past 50 years, linguists, computer scientists, and scholars of the humanities have been jointly developing automated methods to identify authors based on the style of their writing. All authors possess peculiarities of habit that influence the form and content of their written works. These characteristics can often be quantified and measured using machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the methods of authorship attribution that can be applied to the problem of social media forensics. Furthermore, we examine emerging supervised learning-based methods that are effective for small sample sizes, and provide step-by-step explanations for several scalable approaches as instructional case studies for newcomers to the field. We argue that there is a significant need in forensics for new authorship attribution algorithms that can exploit context, can process multi-modal data, and are tolerant to incomplete knowledge of the space of all possible authors at training time.

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 14

  1. 2014, Guess Language Guess the Natural Language of a Text
  2. stamatatos, 2014, Overview of the author identification task at PAN 2014, Proc Conf CLEF, 877
  3. burrows, 1992, Computers and the study of literature, Computers and Written Texts, 1, 167
  4. stolerman, 2014, Classify, but verify: Breaking the closed-world assumption in stylometric authorship attribution, Proc Annu IFIP WG Int Conf Digit Forensics, 1
  5. eder, 2015, Stylo Functions for a Variety of Stylometric Analyses
  6. rashid, 2013, Simple Ways to Make Anonymous Phone Calls Secure Your Data
  7. ellegård, 1964, A Statistical method for determining authorship, Junius Lett, 40, 85
  8. 2013, In Search of OPSEC Magic Sauce Hacker OPSEC Blog
  9. kelly, 2014, Pyenchant A spellchecking Library for Python
  10. mascol, 1888, Curves of Pauline and pseudo-Pauline style I, Unitarian Review, 30, 453
  11. mccallum, 2002, Mallet A machine learning for language toolkit
  12. merriam, 1979, What Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII (part I), Bard, 2, 81
  13. merriam, 1982, The authorship of Sir Thomas More, ALLC Bull Assoc Library Linguistic Comput, 10, 1
  14. merriam, 1980, What Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII (part II), Bard, 2, 11

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Metadata

Authors
Rocha, A., Scheirer, W. J., Forstall, C. W., Cavalcante, T., Theophilo, A., Shen, B., Carvalho, A. R. B., & Stamatatos, E.
Affiliations
  • Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) (BR)
  • University of Notre Dame (US)
  • University of the Aegean (GR)
ORCID
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
2017-01
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
5-33
ISSN
  • 1556-6013 (ISSN-L)
  • 1556-6021
DOI
10.1109/tifs.2016.2603960
OpenAlex
W2508310662
Cited by
222
References
207
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 39 · 2020: 43 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 27 · 2017: 14
FWCI
18.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplorehelp/downloads/license-information/IEEE.html (vor)
Locations
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education and Personnel — CAPES (DeepEyes project)
  • São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP (through the DéjàVu Project) (15/19222-9)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Authorship Attribution and Profiling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › User Authentication and Security Systems
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
Keywords
authorship attribution, social media forensics, stylistic analysis, user identification, anonymity, multimodal data, forensic text analysis

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