Does Burrows' Delta really confirm that Rowling and Galbraith are the same author?
This work addresses the validity of stylometric methods for real-world authorship attribution, though it appears incremental by focusing on data relevance rather than method innovation.
The paper tests the reliability of Burrows' Delta for author attribution by applying it to a more relevant set of texts, specifically to verify if J.K. Rowling wrote 'The Cuckoo's Calling', as the original method used outdated and genre-mismatched data.
The stylo package includes a frequency table that can be used to calculate distances between texts and thus independently solve the problem of attribution of The Cuckoo's Calling, a novel that J.K. Rowling said she wrote. However, the set of texts for this table is very vulnerable to criticism. The authors there are not modern, they wrote in a different genre. I set out to test the performance of the method on texts that are more relevant to the research question.