The Federalist Revisited: New Directions in Authorship Attribution

The Federalist Papers, twelve of which are claimed by both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, have long been used as a testing-ground for authorship attribution techniques despite the fact that the styles of Hamilton and Madison are unusually similar. This paper assesses the value of three novel stylometric techniques by applying them to the Federalist problem. The techniques examined are a multivariate approach to vocabulary richness, analysis of the frequencies of occurrence of sets of common high-frequency words, and use of a machine-learning package based on a ‘genetic algorithm’ to seek relational expressions characterizing authorial styles. All three approaches produce encouraging results to what is acknowledged to be a difficult problem.