Authorship Analysis as a Text Classification or Clustering Problem

Many such'literary' quandaries are inspected by expert linguists as analysing and categorising discourses is fairly complex, domain-specific and highly multi-dimensional. One of latest research areas in Natural Language Processing is Authorship Analysis which is trying to leverage the computational power of big-data and artificial intelligence combined with linguistics and cognitive psychology to encode automatic classification of texts, identification of author profiles and resolution of authorship conflicts. This article is an attempt to introduce the concept of authorship analysis, its application areas and the major sub-tasks associated with it. The art and science of discriminating between writing styles of authors by identifying the characteristics of the persona of the authors and examining articles authored by them is called Authorship Analysis. Consequentially, it also aims to determine biographic characteristics of an individual like age, gender, native language and cognitive psychological traits based on "available information" pertaining to that individual. In this article, "available information" refers to textual data only in the context of authorship analysis, however, information in this context could go beyond textual format as it might also involve usage of multi-modal observations.