Re: Authorship Testing

Ray Liere (lierer@mail.CS.ORST.EDU)
Fri, 2 Feb 1996 09:12:21 -0800 (PST)

You may be interested in looking at the book "Applied Bayesian and Classical
Inference: The Case of the Federalist Papers" by Mosteller and Wallace,
Springer-Verlag, 1984

The Federalist Papers were written in 1787-1788 by Hamilton, Madison,
and Jay. They are short essays that were meant to convince citizens
to ratify the proposed U.S. Constitution. When published (usually in
newspapers), the actual author was not indicated. Of the 85 essays,
several are disputed as to authorship.

Mosteller and Wallace use statistical methods to investigate the
authorship of the disputed essays. Certainly this is not "software
out of the box", but it may give you ideas on how to use existing
statistical software to run tests for your purposes.

Ray Liere
lierer@mail.cs.orst.edu