Can forensic stylometry unmask an anonymous author?

Unmasking the hidden authors: How forensic stylometry revealed J.K. Rowling’s secret pen name and its implications for business and security.

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, was found to have written under a pseudonym thanks to forensic stylometry, a technique using natural language processing. [¹^]

[¹^]: Image source: Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons.

In 2013 JK Rowling released a new detective novel under the pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, seeking a release from the Harry Potter frenzy. However, two professors of computational linguistics managed to prove that the mystery author was indeed Rowling herself, using a technique called forensic stylometry[²^].

[²^]: Here’s how they did it: Calculating a “fingerprint”.

By comparing the “linguistic fingerprint” of the Galbraith book to those of known authors, they found a likely match with Rowling. A linguistic fingerprint is a unique pattern of word use which all of us have, whether consciously or not.

Let’s have a look at some of the linguistic fingerprints obtained for three famous female authors who wrote under male pseudonyms:

This method of identifying text authors through their unique writing style is referred to as forensic stylometry.

Modern technology such as ‘deep learning’ software and computational power have refined and accelerated the process of forensic stylometry. Now all that’s needed is a large dataset, without the complexity of creating a unique recipe for your fingerprint.

I personally favour the Convolutional Neural Network, a deep learning technique originally designed for images but surprisingly effective for natural language processing!

Commercial applications of this technology are vast, from identifying the authors of threatening documents to parsing financial reports and even spam flagging.

If this subject piques your interest, or you need assistance developing this tech, feel free to reach out! You can do so via our contact form.

Mark your calendars! On 5th July 2018, we’re hosting a workshop on forensic stylometry at the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford University. Be sure to register here.

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