Introduction to Authorship Analysis as a Text Classification/Clustering Problem

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. It aims to determine characteristics of an individual like age, gender, native language and personality 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. Multi-modal observations capture characteristic features such as voice, intonation, gestures, body posture and other physical behavioral aspects of an individual. A combination of all these characteristics reflects the persona of an individual and consequently helps in profiling that individual.