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I wonder if there's an RCT on whether these techniques actually work. Without validation, it's hard to take the claims too seriously.
by tehjoker 5y ago
I wonder if there's an RCT on whether these techniques actually work. Without validation, it's hard to take the claims too seriously.
- mwattsun 5y agoI'm sure they can achieve a degree of certainty, but not enough to hold up in a court of law because writing styles can be faked as well
- tehjoker 5y agoI think one can pose the question of effectiveness in adversarial vs non-adversarial situations. I do think there are occasional "tells" someone has, but they're probably obvious things if you know the person. However, I'd still be skeptical because there are so many factors to consider in whether it works such as corpus selection. I'm not a statistician, but my spider sense prickled when I saw mention of "thousands" of features in the vector due to the curse of dimensionality.
- mwattsun 5y ago> but they're probably obvious things if you know the person An example of this is how Ted Kaczynski got caught: His brother recognized his writing and turned him in
- woliveirajr 5y agoThere are some experiments that use a relatively big dataset (100 of authors), each one with 30 documents (to be used as training, validation and test). Then you try for authorship (who is the author of _this_ document?) and get it right for 80% of the tries. Or get that the author is in the top-5 100% of the tries. Perhaps those techniques aren't enough to find out the author from the whole world population but are useful enough to reduce the scope of some investigation inside some campus,for example. (Disclaimer: PhD about it)