Authorship classification: A syntactic tree mining approach

In the past, there have been dozens of studies on automatic authorship classification, and many of these studies concluded that the writing style is one of the best indicators of original authorship. From among the hundreds of features which were developed, syntactic features were best able to reflect an author's writing style. However, due to the high computational complexity of extracting and computing syntactic features, only simple variations of basic syntactic features of function words and part-of-speech tags were considered. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mining discriminative k-embedded-edge subtree patterns from a given set of syntactic trees that reduces the computational burden of using complex syntactic structures as a feature set. This method is shown to increase the classification accuracy. We also design a new kernel based on these features. Comprehensive experiments on real datasets of news articles and movie reviews demonstrate that our approach is reliable and more accurate than previous studies.