Biblio

Textual deception constitutes a major problem for online security. Many studies have argued that deceptiveness leaves traces in writing style, which could be detected using text classification techniques. By conducting an extensive literature review of existing empirical work, we demonstrate that while certain linguistic features have been indicative of deception in certain corpora, they fail to generalize across divergent semantic domains. We suggest that deceptiveness as such leaves no content-invariant stylistic trace, and textual similarity measures provide a superior means of classifying texts as potentially deceptive. Additionally, we discuss forms of deception beyond semantic content, focusing on hiding author identity by writing style obfuscation. Surveying the literature on both author identification and obfuscation techniques, we conclude that current style transformation methods fail to achieve reliable obfuscation while simultaneously ensuring semantic faithfulness to the original text. We propose that future work in style transformation should pay particular attention to disallowing semantically drastic changes.

This paper presents a framework to identify the authors of Thai online messages. The identification is based on 53 writing attributes and the selected algorithms are support vector machine (SVM) and C4.5 decision tree. Experimental results indicate that the overall accuracies achieved by the SVM and the C4.5 were 79% and 75%, respectively. This difference was not statistically significant (at 95% confidence interval). As for the performance of identifying individual authors, in some cases the SVM was clearly better than the C4.5. But there were also other cases where both of them could not distinguish one author from another.