Outside the cave of shadows: using syntactic annotation to enhance authorship attribution

This paper reports an experiment in authorship attribution in which statistical measures and methods that have been widely applied to words and their frequencies of use are applied to rewrite rules as they appear in a syntactically annotated corpus. The outcome of this experiment suggests that the frequencies with which syntactic rewrite rules are put to use provide a better clue to authorship than word usage. Complementary methods focusing on the high-frequency head and the low-frequency tail of the distribution independently reveal a higher resolution than traditional word-based analyses, and promise enhanced accuracy for authorship attribution.