This paper proposes an unsupervised approach for segmenting a multiauthor document into authorial components . The key novelty is that we utilize the sequential patterns hidden among document elements when determining their authorships . For this purpose , we adopt Hidden Markov Model ( HMM ) and construct a sequential probabilistic model to capture the dependencies of sequential sentences and their authorships . An unsupervised learning method is developed to initialize the HMM parameters . Experimental results on benchmark datasets have demonstrated the significant benefit of our idea and our approach has outperformed the state-of-the-arts on all tests . As an example of its applications , the proposed approach is applied for attributing authorship of a document and has also shown promising results . Authorship analysis is a process of inspecting documents in order to extract authorial information about these documents . It is considered as a general concept that embraces several types of authorship subjects , including authorship verif ication , plagiarism detection and author attribution . Authorship verification ( Brocardo et al . , 2013 ; Potha and Stamatatos , 2014 ) decides whether a given document is written by a specific author . Plagiarism detection ( Stein et al . , 2011 ; Kestemont et al . , 2011 ) seeks to expose the similarity between two texts . However , it is un-able to determine if they are written by the same author . In author attribution ( Juola , 2006 ; Savoy , 2015 ) , a real author of an anonymous document is predicted using labeled documents of a set of candidate authors . Another significant subject in authorship analysis , which has received comparatively less attention from research community , is authorship-based document decomposition ( ABDD ) . This subject is to group the sentences of a multi-author document to different classes , of which each contains the sentences written by only one author . Many applications can take advantage of such a subject , especially those in forensic investigation , which aim to determine the authorship of sentences in a multi-author document . Furthermore , this kind of subject is beneficial for detecting plagiarism in a document and defining contributions of authors in a multi-author document for commercial purpose . ABDD can also be applied to identify which source ( regarded as an ' author ' in this paper ) a part of a document is copied from when the document is formed by taking contents from various sources . In despite of the benefits of ABDD , there has been little research reported on this subject . Koppel et al . ( 2011 ) are the first researchers who implemented an unsupervised approach for ABDD . However , their approach is restricted to Hebrew documents only . The authors of Akiva and Koppel ( 2013 ) addressed the drawbacks of the above approach by proposing a generic unsupervised approach for ABDD . Their approach utilized distance measurements to increase the precision and accuracy of clustering and classification phases , respectively . The accuracy of their approach is highly dependent on the number of au-thors . When the number of authors increases , the accuracy of the approach is significantly dropped . Giannella ( 2015 ) presented an improved approach for ABDD when the number of authors of the document is known or unknown . In his approach , a Bayesian segmentation algorithm is applied , which is followed by a segment clustering algorithm . However , the author tested his approach by using only documents with a few transitions among authors . Furthermore , the accuracy of the approach is very sensitive to the setting of its parameters . In Aldebei et al . ( 2015 ) , the authors presented an unsupervised approach ABDD by exploiting the differences in the posterior probabilities of a Naive-Bayesian model in order to increase the precision and the classification accuracy , and to be less dependent on the number of authors in comparing with the approach in Akiva and Koppel ( 2013 ) . Their work was tested on documents with up to 400 transitions among authors and the accuracy of their approach was not sensitive to the setting of parameters , in contrast with the approach in Giannella ( 2015 ) . However , the performance of their approach greatly depends on a threshold , of which the optimal value for an individual document is not easy to find . Some other works have focused on segmenting a document into components according to their topics . For applications where the topics of documents are unavailable , these topicbased solutions will fail . In this paper , the ABDD approach is independent of documents ' topics . All of the existing works have assumed that the observations ( i.e. , sentences ) are independent and identically distributed ( i.i.d . ) . No consideration has been given to the contextual information between the observations . However , in some cases , the i.i.d . assumption is deemed as a poor one ( Rogovschi et al . , 2010 ) . In this paper , we will relax this assumption and consider sentences of a document as a sequence of observations . We make use of the contextual information hidden between sentences in order to identify the authorship of each sentence in a document . In other words , the authorships of the " previous " and " subsequent " sentences have relationships with the authorship of the current sentence . There-fore , in this paper , a well-known sequential model , Hidden Markov Model ( HMM ) , is used for modelling the sequential patterns of the document in order to describe the authorship relationships . The contributions of this article are summarized as follows . 1 . We capture the dependencies between consecutive elements in a document to identify different authorial components and construct an HMM for classification . It is for the first time the sequential patterns hidden among document elements is considered for such a problem . 2 . To build and learn the HMM model , an unsupervised learning method is first proposed to estimate its initial parameters , and it does not require any information of authors or document 's context other than how many authors have contributed to write the document . 3 . Different from the approach in Aldebei et al . ( 2015 ) , the proposed unsupervised approach no longer relies on any predetermined threshold for ABDD . 4 . Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our ideas on both widely-used artificial benchmark datasets and an authentic scientific document . As an example of its applications , the proposed approach is also applied for attributing authorship on a popular dataset . The proposed approach can not only correctly determine the author of a disputed document but also provide a way for measuring the confidence level of the authorship decision for the first time . The rest of this article is organised as follows . Section 2 reviews the HMM . Section 3 presents the details of our proposed approach , including the processes for initialization and learning of HMM parameters , and the Viterbi decoding process for classification . Experiments are conducted in Section 4 , followed by the conclusion in Section 5 . We have developed an unsupervised approach for decomposing a multi-author document based on authorship . Different from the stateof-the-art approaches , we have innovatively made use of the sequential information hidden among document elements . For this purpose , we have used HMM and constructed a sequential probabilistic model , which is used to find the best sequence of authors that represents the sentences of the document . An unsupervised learning method has also been developed to estimate the initial parameter values of HMM . Comparative experiments conducted on benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our ideas with superior perfor-mance achieved on both artificial and authentic documents . An application of the proposed approach on authorship attribution has also achieved perfect results of 100 % accuracies together with confidence measurement for the first time .

Challenge: There is no method for multiauthor segmentation of a document into author components which can be applied to authorship verification, plagiarism detection and author attribution.
Approach: They propose a HMM-based sequential probabilistic model that captures the dependencies of sequential sentences and their authors coupled with an unsupervised initialization method.
Outcome: Experiments with artificial and authentic scientific document datasets show that the proposed model outperforms existing methods and also be able to provide confidence scores.