Analysis of parameters on author attribution of Spanish electronic short texts

Abstract – Forensic Linguistics is the analysis of the language which is related to law, either as evidence or as legal discourse. Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the author of a document when the language is used as evidence in a courtroom, so it will be of interest to police investigators and the wider judicial process. Recent advances in Forensic Linguistics are related to the analysis of texts coming from emails, social networks and messages coming from mobile phones. This work continues previous research and explores how different classification algorithms, the size of the text and the type of linguistic feature used in authorship attribution may affect the results in the authorship attribution of Spanish short messages on online forums. Important differences in precision have been assessed when varying both the size of the texts investigated and the algorithms used for classification.