Authorship Identification of Translational Algorithms

Keishin Nishiyama, University of Louisville
Glory O. Adebayo, University of Louisville
Roman Yampolskiy, University of Louisville

Abstract

Authorship analysis is a process of identifying a true writer of a given document and has been studied for decades. However, only a handful of studies of authorship identification of translators are available even though online translations are widely available and popularly employed in automatic translations of posts in social networking services. The identification of translation algorithms has potential to contribute to the investigation of cybercrimes, involving translation of scam messages by algorithmic translations to reach speakers of foreign languages. This study tested bag of words (BOW) approach in authorship attribution and the existing approaches to translator attribution. We also proposed a simple but accurate feature that extracts the combinations of lexical and syntactic information from texts. Our experiments show that the proposed feature is text size invariant.