Can Author Obfuscation Trump Forensic Linguistics? (webis.de)

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone possesses their own writing style, which may be used to identify authors even if they wish to remain anonymous: linguists employ stylometry to settle disputes over the authorship of historic texts as well as more recent cases, and are called to verify the authors of suicide notes or threatening letters. Computer linguists carry out research on software for forensic text analyses, and a recent study shows many of these approaches to be reproducible. Now, a competition has been announced to develop obfuscation software to hide an author's style with the task: "Given a document, paraphrase it so that its writing style does not match that of its original author, anymore." We'll see what comes out of that. Meanwhile, the question remains: Who will win in the long run? Forensic linguists, or obfuscation technology?

Comments

Stephen King is not dead.

[I'm New Around Here]

Back in the 1970's Stephen King wrote some novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It worked for a while, but people were able to figure out that Bachman wrote in the same style as the famous Stephen King. Eventually the secret broke.

I wonder if those novels written under the pseudonym would make a good test of the system. Run them through the process, give the results to newer readers of King's known works, and see if they notice the similarities others did in the past.

Re:Ummm

[ohieaux]

English
Want to obfuscate text? Just run it through a language or 5, then back to the original language using something like google translate. No paraphrasing needed.
Afrikaans
Wil teks verduisteren ? Net hardloop dit deur 'n taal of 5 , dan terug na die oorspronklike taal gebruik van iets soos Google vertaal. Geen parafrasering nodig .
Albanian
Dëshironi tekstin errët ? Vetëm të drejtuar atë nëpërmjet një gjuhe ose 5 , pastaj kthehet për të përdorur gjuhën origjinale e diçka si Google Translate . Nuk ka parafrazuar nevojshme .
Arabic
5 . .
Armenian
, . Just 5, Google . .
English
You want the text in the dark. Just run it through the language or 5 , then return to the original source using something like Google language translation . A quote is necessary .
Note: international characters may not show in comment.