Authorship attribution – the computational task of identifying the author of a given text document within a set of possible candidates – has been attracting interest in Natural Language Processing research for many years. At the same time, significant advances have also been observed in the related field of author profiling, that is, the computational task of learning author demographics from text such as gender, age and others. The close relation between the two topics – both of which focused on gaining knowledge about the individual who wrote a piece of text – suggests that research in these fields may benefit from each other. To illustrate this, this work addresses the issue of author identification with the aid of author profiling methods, adding demographics predictions to an authorship attribution architecture that may be particularly suitable to extensions of this kind, namely, a stack of classifiers devoted to different aspects of the input text (words, characters and text distortion patterns.) The enriched model is evaluated across a range of text domains, languages and author profiling estimators, and its results are shown to compare favourably to those obtained by a standard authorship attribution method that does not have access to author demographics predictions.

The rise of social media empowers people to interact and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. The possibility of being anonymous avoids censorship and enables freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this anonymity might lead to cybersecurity issues, such as opinion spam, sexual harassment, incitement to hatred or even terrorism propaganda. In such cases, there is a need to know more about the anonymous users and this could be useful in several domains beyond security and forensics such as marketing, for example. In this paper, we focus on a fine-grained analysis of language varieties while considering also the authors’ demographics. We present a Low-Dimensionality Statistical Embedding method to represent text documents. We compared the performance of this method with the best performing teams in the Author Profiling task at PAN 2017. We obtained an average accuracy of 92.08% versus 91.84% for the best performing team at PAN 2017. We also analyse the relationship of the language variety identification with the authors’ gender. Furthermore, we applied our proposed method to a more fine-grained annotated corpus of Arabic varieties covering 22 Arab countries and obtained an overall accuracy of 88.89%. We have also investigated the effect of the authors’ age and gender on the identification of the different Arabic varieties, as well as the effect of the corpus size on the performance of our method.

This paper presents a novel neural architecture capable of outperforming state-of-the-art systems on the task of language variety classification. The architecture is a hybrid that combines character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) features with weighted bag-of-n-grams (BON) features and is therefore capable of leveraging both character-level and document/corpus-level information. We tested the system on the Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL) language variety benchmark data set from the VarDial 2017 DSL shared task, which contains data from six different language groups, as well as on two smaller data sets (the Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) Corpus and the German Dialect Identification (GDI) Corpus, from the VarDial 2016 ADI and VarDial 2018 GDI shared tasks, respectively). We managed to outperform the winning system in the DSL shared task by a margin of about 0.4 percentage points and the winning system in the ADI shared task by a margin of about 0.2 percentage points in terms of weighted F1 score without conducting any language group-specific parameter tweaking. An ablation study suggests that weighted BON features contribute more to the overall performance of the system than the CNN-based features, which partially explains the uncompetitiveness of deep learning approaches in the past VarDial DSL shared tasks. Finally, we have implemented our system in a workflow, available in the ClowdFlows platform, in order to make it easily available also to the non-programming members of the research community.