Selecting syntactic attributes for authorship attribution

In this work we present a methodology to select syntactic attributes for authorship attribution. The approach takes into account a multi-objective genetic algorithm and a Support Vector Machine classifier and it operates in a wrapper mode. Through a series of comprehensive experiments on a database composed of 3000 short articles written in Portuguese we show that the proposed methodology is able to provide a concise subset of attributes, which increases the recognition rate in about 15 percentage points.