Authorship attribution using committee machines with k-nearest neighbors rated voting

Authorship attribution, namely determination of the author of a text, may become an extraordinarily complex and sensitive job due to its relatively difficult feature extraction phase and highly nonlinear nature. This paper proposes a classification tool using committee machines consisting of multilayered perceptron neural networks (MLP) to identify the author of a text. Each expert is an individual MLP learning complex input-output relation composed of 14 lexical, stylometric attributes extracted from the corpus. The resulting mapping after training is used to identify the texts in German language written by two different authors. Unlike other committee based classification tools individual answers of the experts are combined with a novel voting method, k-nearest neighbors rated voting. The proposed method shows very promising results when benchmarked with simple majority voting technique.