Question: What is Stylometry?
Evidence: Stylometry is defined as, "the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another". It is a centuries-old practice, dating back the early Renaissance. It is most often used to attribute authorship to disputed or anonymous documents. Stylometry techniques have also successfully been applied to other, non-linguistic fields, such as paintings and music. The main principles of stylometry were compiled and laid out by the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski in 1890 in his work "Principes de stylométrie" BIBREF0 .
Today, there are millions of users with accounts and profiles on many different social media and networking sites. It is not uncommon for users to have multiple accounts on different social media and networking sites. With so many networking, emailing, and photo sharing sites on the Web, a user often accumulates an abundance of account profiles. There is an increasing focus from the academic and business worlds on aggregating user information across different sites, allowing for the development of more complete user profiles. There currently exist several businesses that focus on this task BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 . These businesses use the aggregate profiles for advertising, background checks or customer service related tasks. Moreover, profile matching across social networks, can assist the growing field of social media rumor detection BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , since many malicious rumors are spread on different social media platforms by the same people, using different accounts and usernames.
Motivated by traditional stylometry and the growing interest in matching user accounts across Internet services, we created models for Digital Stylometry, which fuses traditional stylometry techniques with big-data driven social informatics methods used commonly in analyzing social networks. Our models use linguistic and temporal activity patterns of users on different accounts to match accounts belonging to the same person. We evaluated our models on $11,224$ accounts belonging to $5,612$ distinct users on two of the largest social media networks, Twitter and Facebook. The only information that was used in our models were the time and the linguistic content of posts by the users. We intentionally did not use any other information, especially the potentially personally identifiable information that was explicitly provided by the user, such as the screen name, birthday or location. This is in accordance with traditional stylometry techniques, since people could misstate, omit, or lie about this information. Also, we wanted to show that there are implicit clues about the identities of users in the content (language) and context (time) of the users' interactions with social networks that can be used to link their accounts across different services.
Other than the obvious technical goal, the purpose of this paper is to shed light on the relative ease with which seemingly innocuous information can be used to track users across social networks, even when signing up on different services using completely different account and profile information (such as name and birthday). This paper is as much of a technical contribution, as it is a warning to users who increasingly share a large part of their private lives on these services.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. In the next sections we will review related work on linking profiles, followed by a description of our data collection and annotation efforts. After that, we discuss the linguistic, temporal and combined temporal-linguistic models developed for linking user profiles. Finally, we discuss and summarize our findings and contributions and discuss possible paths for future work.
Stylometry is defined as, ”the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another”.
Answer: The statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another.