Authorship Attribution of Late 19th Century Novels using GAN-BERT

Abstract

Authorship attribution aims to identify the author of an anonymous text. The task becomes even more worthwhile when it comes to lit- erary works. For example, pen names were commonly used by female authors in the 19th century resulting in some literary works being incorrectly attributed or claimed. With this motivation, we collated a dataset of late 19th- century novels in English. Due to the imbalance in the dataset and the unavailability of enough data per author, we employed the GAN- BERT model along with data sampling strategies to fine-tune a transformer-based model for authorship attribution. Differently from the earlier studies on the GAN-BERT model, we conducted transfer learning on comparatively smaller author subsets to train more focused author-specific models yielding performance over 0.88 accuracy and F1 scores. Furthermore, we observed that increasing the sample size has a negative impact on the model’s performance. Our research mainly contributes to the ongoing authorship attribution research using GAN-BERT architecture, especially in attributing disputed novelists in the late 19th century.