Use of language as a cognitive biometric trait

This paper investigates whether the cognitive state of a person can be learnt and used as a novel biometric trait. We explore the idea of using language written by an author, as his/her cognitive fingerprint. The dataset consists of millions of blogs written by thousands of authors on the Internet. Our proposed method learns a classifier that can distinguish between genuine and impostor authors. Our results are encouraging (we report 72% Area under the ROC curve) and show that users do have a distinctive linguistic style, which is evident even when analyzing a corpora as large and diverse as the Internet. When we tested on new authors that the system had never encountered before, our methodology correctly identified genuine authors with 78% accuracy and impostors with 76% accuracy.