Summer Academy "Who Wrote the Web?"

Synopsis

The goal of this working group was to give an overview of research and development in the area of natural language processing with a particular focus on technologies to analyze the authorship of text documents. These technologies are posed to be eventually employed to answer the overarching question of "Who wrote the Web?" Particularly in web search and information retrieval, and in times of fake news, it is important to learn about who wrote a given text, in order to judge by its author's reputation whether the text's message is trustworthy. Modern authorship technologies are also employed within digital text forensics, where forensic linguists and law enforcement are tasked with judging the believability of, for example, threatening letters and suicide notes. Workshop participants were tasked with reproducing the most influential approaches to authorship attribution in order to demonstrate the viability of this technology on modern evaluation datasets, as well as how easy it is for people with a technical background (not necessarily computer science) to get such technology running.

Important Dates

• June 21 - September 20, 2015: Preparation and reproduction of authorship analysis technology.
• September 21 - October 3, 2015: Workshop in La Colle sur Loup, France.

Sponsors