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I have a suggestion, which others may have thought of: can you randomize the style using programs? 1. You write an essay. 2. [Word-level randomization] An alg
by sn41 8y ago
I have a suggestion, which others may have thought of: can you randomize the style using programs?
1. You write an essay.
2. [Word-level randomization] An algorithm looks at it, as a first cut, replaces uncommon words with common equivalents.
3. [Sentence-level randomization] Changes each sentence to a randomly selected grammatically correct equivalent.
4. [Paragraph-level randomization] Adds spurious repetitions, replace some paragraphs with automated summarized versions.
i.e. destroy the rhetorical effect, but get the message across so as to defeat NLP-based identification. If the content of the message is important, and the final version is okay to the author, this might be safer for anonymous disclosures.
- tmalsburg2 8y agoPerhaps it would be enough to just Google-translate the text to some other language and back?
- sn41 8y agoYes, translating different paragraphs into different languages and back might work.
- clickok 8y agoThat might defeat NLP-based analysis, but the use of obfuscation and the methods employed still tells you something about potential authors. If someone in an organization writes an essay disparaging that organization, but does so in an unnatural style that seems intended to defeat author identification, then you know that they're aware of stylometric analysis, and have created or downloaded a tool designed to interfere with assigning attribution. Depending on the organization, that might shrink the candidate pool more drastically than clustering based on sentence length, favorite words, or other linguistic quirks.