Modupe, Abiodun2024-10-242024-10-242024Modupe, Abiodun. (2024). Regularized Deep Neural Network for Post-Authorship Attribution [PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WireDSpace.https://hdl.handle.net/10539/41914https://hdl.handle.net/10539/41914A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, School of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024Post-authorship attribution is the computational process of determining the legitimate author of an online text snippet, such as an email, blog, forum post, or chat log, by employing stylometric features. The process consists of analysing various linguistic and writing patterns, such as vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation usage, and even the use of specific words or phrases. By comparing these features to a known set of writing pieces from potential authors, investigators can make educated hypotheses about the true authorship of a text snippet. Additionally, post-authorship attribution has applications in fields like forensic linguistics and cybersecurity, where determining the source of a text can be crucial for investigations or identifying potential threats. Furthermore, in a verification procedure to proactively uncover misogynistic, misandrist, xenophobic, and abusive posts on the internet or social networks, finding a suitable text representation to adequately symbolise and capture an author’s distinctive writing from a computational linguistics perspective is typically known as a stylometric analysis. Additionally, most of the posts on social media or online are generally rife with ambiguous terminologies that could potentially compromise and influence the precision of the early proposed authorship attribution model. The majority of extracted stylistic elements in words are idioms, onomatopoeias, homophones, phonemes, synonyms, acronyms, anaphora, and polysemy, which are fundamentally difficult to interpret by most existing natural language processing (NLP) systems. These difficulties make it difficult to correctly identify the true author of a given text. Therefore, further advancements in NLP systems are necessary to effectively handle these complex linguistic elements and improve the accuracy of authorship attribution models. In this thesis, we introduce a regularised deep neural network (RDNN) model to solve the challenges that come with figuring out who wrote what after the fact. The proposed method utilises a convolutional neural network, a bidirectional long short-term memory encoder, and a distributed highway network to effectively address the post-authorship attribution problem. The neural network was utilised to generate lexical stylometric features, which were then fed into the bidirectional encoder to produce a syntactic feature vector representation. The feature vector was then fed into the distributed high-speed networks for regularisation to reduce network generalisation errors. The regularised feature vector was then given to the bidirectional decoder to learn the author’s writing style. The feature classification layer is made up of a fully connected network and a SoftMax function for prediction. The RDNN method outperformed the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall on the majority of the benchmark datasets. These results highlight the potential of the proposed method to significantly improve classification performance in various domains. Again, the introduction of an interactive system to visualise the performance of the proposed method would further enhance its usability and effectiveness in quantifying the contribution of the author’s writing characteristics in both online text snippets and literary documents. It is useful in processing the evidence that is needed to support claims or draw conclusions about the author’s writing style or intent during the pre-trial investigation by the law enforcement agent in the court of law. The incorporation of this method into the pretrial stage greatly strengthens the credibility and validity of the findings presented in court and has the potential to revolutionise the field of authorship attribution and enhance the accuracy of forensic investigations. Furthermore, it ensures a fair and just legal process for all parties involved by providing concrete evidence to support or challenge claims. We are also aware of the limitations of the proposed methods and recognise the need for additional research to overcome these constraints and improve the overall reliability and applicability of post-authorship attribution of online text snippets and literary documents for forensic investigations. Even though the proposed methods have revealed some unusual differences in author writing style, such as how influential writers, regular people, and suspected authors use language, the evidence from the results with the features extracted from the texts has shown promise for identifying authorship patterns and aiding in forensic analyses. However, much work remains to be done to validate the methodologies’ usefulness and dependability as effective authorship attribution procedures. Further research is needed to determine the extent to which external factors, such as the context in which the text was written or the author’s emotional state, may impact the identified authorship patterns. Additionally, it is crucial to establish a comprehensive dataset that includes a diverse range of authors and writing styles to ensure the generalizability of the findings and enhance the reliability of forensic analyses. Furthermore, the dataset used in this thesis does not include a diverse variety of authors and writing styles, such as impostors attempting to impersonate another author, which limits the generalizability of the conclusions and undermines the credibility of forensic analysis. More studies can be conducted to broaden the proposed strategy for detecting and distinguishing impostors’ writing styles from those of authentic authors when committing crimes on both online and literary documents. It is conceivable for numerous criminals to collaborate to perpetrate a crime, which could aid in improving the proposed methods for detecting the existence of multiple impostors or the contribution of each criminal writing style based on the person or individual they are attempting to mimic. The likelihood of numerous offenders working together complicates the investigation and necessitates advanced procedures for identifying their individual contributions, as well as both authentic and manufactured impostor contents within the text. This is especially difficult on social media, where fake accounts and anonymous profiles can make it difficult to determine the true identity of those involved, which can come from a variety of sources, including text, WhatsApps, chat images, videos, and so on, and can lead to the spread of misinformation and manipulation. As a result, promoting a hybrid approach that goes beyond text as evidence could help address some of the concerns raised above. For example, integrating audio and visual data may provide a more complete perspective of the scenario. As a result, such an approach exacerbates the restrictions indicated in the distribution of data and may necessitate more storage and analytical resources. However, it can also lead to a more accurate and nuanced analysis of the situationen© 2024 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.Authorship AttributionAuthor Writing StyleAuthorship AnalysisAuthorship VerificationAuthorship ProfilingMachine LearningDeep learningCharacter and Word EmbeddingSubword EmbeddingUCTDSocial MediaOnline Text SnippetsComputational LinguisticsCybercrimeForensic InvestigatorsSDG-3: Good health and well-beingThesisUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg