Grammar as a Behavioral Biometric: Using Cognitively Motivated Grammar Models for Authorship Verification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nini, Andrea, Halvani, Oren, Graner, Lukas, Titze, Sophie, Gherardi, Valerio, Ishihara, Shunichi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nini, Andrea
Halvani, Oren
Graner, Lukas
Titze, Sophie
Gherardi, Valerio
Ishihara, Shunichi
author_facet Nini, Andrea
Halvani, Oren
Graner, Lukas
Titze, Sophie
Gherardi, Valerio
Ishihara, Shunichi
contents Authorship Verification (AV) is a key area of research in digital text forensics, which addresses the fundamental question of whether two texts were written by the same person. Numerous computational approaches have been proposed over the last two decades in an attempt to address this challenge. However, existing AV methods often suffer from high complexity, low explainability and especially from a lack of clear scientific justification. We propose a simpler method based on modeling the grammar of an author following Cognitive Linguistics principles. These models are used to calculate $λ_G$ (LambdaG): the ratio of the likelihoods of a document given the candidate's grammar versus given a reference population's grammar. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on twelve datasets and compared against seven baseline methods, demonstrates that LambdaG achieves superior performance, including against several neural network-based AV methods. LambdaG is also robust to small variations in the composition of the reference population and provides interpretable visualizations, enhancing its explainability. We argue that its effectiveness is due to the method's compatibility with Cognitive Linguistics theories predicting that a person's grammar is a behavioral biometric.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_08462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle Grammar as a Behavioral Biometric: Using Cognitively Motivated Grammar Models for Authorship Verification
Nini, Andrea
Halvani, Oren
Graner, Lukas
Titze, Sophie
Gherardi, Valerio
Ishihara, Shunichi
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Authorship Verification (AV) is a key area of research in digital text forensics, which addresses the fundamental question of whether two texts were written by the same person. Numerous computational approaches have been proposed over the last two decades in an attempt to address this challenge. However, existing AV methods often suffer from high complexity, low explainability and especially from a lack of clear scientific justification. We propose a simpler method based on modeling the grammar of an author following Cognitive Linguistics principles. These models are used to calculate $λ_G$ (LambdaG): the ratio of the likelihoods of a document given the candidate's grammar versus given a reference population's grammar. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on twelve datasets and compared against seven baseline methods, demonstrates that LambdaG achieves superior performance, including against several neural network-based AV methods. LambdaG is also robust to small variations in the composition of the reference population and provides interpretable visualizations, enhancing its explainability. We argue that its effectiveness is due to the method's compatibility with Cognitive Linguistics theories predicting that a person's grammar is a behavioral biometric.
title Grammar as a Behavioral Biometric: Using Cognitively Motivated Grammar Models for Authorship Verification
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08462