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International Workshop on Computational Forensics

IWCF 2009: Computational Forensics pp 13–24Cite as

Forensic Authorship Attribution Using Compression Distances to Prototypes

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 5718))

Abstract

In several situations authors prefer to hide their identity. In forensic applications, one can think of extortion and threats in emails and forum messages. These types of messages can easily be adjusted, such that meta data referring to names and addresses is at least unreliable. In this paper, we propose a method to identify authors of short informal messages solely based on the text content. The method uses compression distances between texts as features. Using these features a supervised classifier is learned on a training set of known authors. For the experiments, we prepared a dataset from Dutch newsgroup texts. We compared several state-of-the-art methods to our proposed method for the identification of messages from up to 50 authors. Our method clearly outperformed the other methods. In 65% of the cases the author could be correctly identified, while in 88% of the cases the true author was in the top 5 of the produced ranked list.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Cor J. Veenman

  2. Digital Technology & Biometrics Department, Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Maarten Lambers & Cor J. Veenman

Authors
  1. Maarten Lambers
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  2. Cor J. Veenman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Zeno J. M. H. Geradts

  2. Norwegian Information Security Laboratory, Gjøvik University College, Norway

    Katrin Y. Franke

  3. Digital Technology & Biometrics Department, Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Cor J. Veenman

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lambers, M., Veenman, C.J. (2009). Forensic Authorship Attribution Using Compression Distances to Prototypes. In: Geradts, Z.J.M.H., Franke, K.Y., Veenman, C.J. (eds) Computational Forensics. IWCF 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5718. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03521-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03521-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03520-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03521-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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