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A Study On The Efficacy Of Sentiment Analysis In Author Attribution, Michael J. Schneider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of authorship attribution seeks to characterize an author’s writing style well enough to determine whether he or she has written a text of interest. One subfield of authorship attribution, stylometry, seeks to find the necessary literary attributes to quantify an author’s writing style. The research presented here sought to determine the efficacy of sentiment analysis as a new stylometric feature, by comparing its performance in attributing authorship against the performance of traditional stylometric features. Experimentation, with a corpus of sci-fi texts, found sentiment analysis to have a much lower performance in assigning authorship than the traditional stylometric features.