LAUSR

Being able to identify the author of an anonymous or disputed document is an important task in forensic science. This can be treated as a form of pattern evidence based on writing style, but the subjective analysis of writing style may have all the well-known problems of other forms of subjective pattern evidence. In this paper, we demonstrate a computer program to address these issues. This program analyzes a pair of documents (a known document and a questioned document) to determine if they were written by the same author. More importantly, this paper also validates the accuracy of this program through a large-scale series of controlled experiments involving English language blogs. Across more than 32,000 different document pairs, the system achieved a measured accuracy of 77%. This paper concludes that this system not only addresses a key problem in forensic linguistics, but also provides the repeatability, reproducibility, and measured accuracy levels that are key to the advancement of forensic science.