Authorship Attribution via Occupancy-problem-type Indices

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new methodology for authorship attribution based on a profile of indices related to the occupancy problem, called occupancy-problem indices. The occupancy problem has a long history and is an important example in standard textbooks like Feller (1971). We base our methodology on function words. We establish a testing procedure by constructing a confidence band of the occupancy-problem indices using the sampling distribution of the number of distinct function words. We validate our proposed methodology using controlled and constructed writing samples whose authorship is known. We then apply this methodology to explore the question of who wrote the 15^th Oz book, which has a disputing authorship between Lyman Frank Baum (1856–1919) and his successor Ruth Plumly Thompson (1891–1976) on the Oz series.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped improve the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).