Writer Identification Using Microblogging Texts for Social Media Forensics Show others and affiliations
2021 (English) In: IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, E-ISSN 2637-6407, Vol. 3, no 3, p. 405-426Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Establishing authorship of online texts is fundamental to combat cybercrimes. Unfortunately, text length is limited on some platforms, making the challenge harder. We aim at identifying the authorship of Twitter messages limited to 140 characters. We evaluate popular stylometric features, widely used in literary analysis, and specific Twitter features like URLs, hashtags, replies or quotes. We use two databases with 93 and 3957 authors, respectively. We test varying sized author sets and varying amounts of training/test texts per author. Performance is further improved by feature combination via automatic selection. With a large amount of training Tweets (>500), a good accuracy (Rank-5>80%) is achievable with only a few dozens of test Tweets, even with several thousands of authors. With smaller sample sizes (10-20 training Tweets), the search space can be diminished by 9-15% while keeping a high chance that the correct author is retrieved among the candidates. In such cases, automatic attribution can provide significant time savings to experts in suspect search. For completeness, we report verification results. With few training/test Tweets, the EER is above 20-25%, which is reduced to < 15% if hundreds of training Tweets are available. We also quantify the computational complexity and time permanence of the employed features. © 2019 IEEE.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2021. Vol. 3, no 3, p. 405-426
Keywords [en]
Authorship identification, stylometry, social media forensics, writer identification, writer verification, biometrics
National Category
Signal Processing
Identifiers URN: urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-44264 DOI: 10.1109/TBIOM.2021.3078073 Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85122047280 OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hh-44264 DiVA, id: diva2:1549239
Funder Swedish Research Council, 2016-03497 European Social Fund (ESF) Knowledge Foundation
Note Funding: This work was supported in part by the project 2016-03497 of the Swedish Research Council. Naveed Muhammad has been funded by European Social Fund via IT Academy programme. The authors also thank the CAISR Program of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.
2021-05-052021-05-052024-06-17 Bibliographically approved