Chances and Challenges of Computer Assisted Authorship Attribution

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: Is a certain piece written by Shakespeare or is it not? This question and others,regarding different authors and a plethora of anonymous works, has been askedmultiple times but still remains unacknowledged for many cases.This paper presents a comparison of traditional and computer assisted approaches of Authorship Attribution Studies. The main part of this work consists of chapter four, where the chances of computer assisted authorship attribution will be confronted with it's general challenges, after the most recent techniques are explained. Chapter 4.4 draws a line to forensic linguistics, another specific field of application, where authorship attribution becomes increasingly important. The last chapter summarizes the key points of the paper and outlines the most important findings, concerning (computer assisted) authorship attribution in general and it's impact on literary history in particular.