Forensic stylometry

Every author has a unique fingerprint even when writing in a digital medium. If we are confronted with an anonymous document, it is possible to calculate a linguistic fingerprint of all candidate authors and compare it to the unknown text.

What’s a linguistic fingerprint? Subconsciously we tend to favour some word patterns over others. Is your salad fork “on” the left of the plate, or “to” the left of the plate? Do you favour long words, or short words? By comparing the fingerprint of a mystery novel to the fingerprints of some known authors it’s possible to get a match.

This is a machine learning model which can identify the linguistic fingerprint and assign probabilities to candidate authors.