Explanation in Computational Stylometry

Computational stylometry, as in authorship attribution or profiling, has a large potential for applications in diverse areas: literary science, forensics, language psychology, sociolinguistics, even medical di- agnosis. Yet, many of the basic research questions of this field are not studied systematically or even at all. In this paper we will go into these problems, and suggest that a reinterpretation of current and histori- cal methods in the framework and methodology of machine learning of natural language processing would be helpful. We also argue for more attention in research for explanation in computational stylometry as op- posed to purely quantitative evaluation measures and propose a strategy for data collection and analysis for achieving progress in computational stylometry. We also introduce a fairly new application of computational stylometry in internet security.