Authorship Attribution

Zhang Shaomin

Authorship analysis mainly focuses on three aspects: authorship identification or authorship attribution, authorship characterization and similarity detection (Zheng, Li, Chen and Huang, 2006). The following application will be introduced in the case of authorship attribution.  

The continuing popularity of computers predicts the demise of pen and paper as a medium of handwritten texts, which makes forensic handwriting identification technology gradually restricted. The research on authorship attribution free from handwritten texts, as a supplement to handwriting identification technology, can make a theoretical and practical contribution to investigative and judicial practice in China.

The aim of authorship attribution is to find the powerful linguistic features, especially discourse information (Du, 2012; Du, 2013) features, and classify various types of Chinese texts through these features. After repeated testing and trials, the technique of authorship attribution can be applied dependently together with other investigative techniques, such as handwriting authentication, polygraph. If all the results of investigative techniques, including the authorship attribution, point to the same suspect, the results of the investigation may be used as evidence in judicial practice, for example, to support the final judgment in courtroom trial.

In addition, the technique of authorship attribution has to be tested through long years of practice (similar to clinical testing of drugs) before its independent application to forensic cases as an investigative method.

Once authorship attribution can be used as one of the investigative techniques and ultimately the result of it can be admitted as evidence in court, many related cases would get rid of the restriction on handwriting texts. Specifically, dismissed cases for the lack of handwriting authentication evidence may be put on a new trial because of the availability of authorship attribution evidence in the near future. The application of authorship attribution to judicial practice is an irreversible trend in China.

 

Reference

Du, Jinbang. (2012b). Application of Multimodal Information Corpus Techniques in Legal English Teaching. International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse, 2(4), 19-38.

Du, Jinbang. (2013). How Is Multimodal Information to Be Managed in the Legal English Class? International Journal of Legal English, 1(1), 23-47.

Zheng, R., Li, J., Chen, H., & Huan, Z. (2006). A Framework for Authorship Identification of Online Messages: Writing-Style Features and Classification Techniques. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(3), 378-393.