Tri-Training for authorship attribution with limited training data: a comprehensive study

Authorship attribution (AA) aims to identify the authors of a set of documents. Traditional studies in this area often assume that there are a large set of labeled documents available for training. However, in the real life, it is often difficult or expensive to collect a large set of labeled data. For example, in the online review domain, most reviewers (authors) only write a few reviews, which are not enough to serve as the training data for accurate classification. In this paper, we present a novel three-view Tri-Training method to iteratively identify authors of unlabeled data to augment the training set. The key idea is to first represent each document in three distinct views, and then perform Tri-Training to exploit the large amount of unlabeled documents. Starting from 10 training documents per author, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed Tri-Training method for AA. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised method CNG+SVM and other baselines.