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The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

blog.jonlu.ca

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Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#11

Post by a-dub »

a-dub wrote: post #8
jonluca wrote: post #2

This is my first project in unsupervised NLP, so let me know if there's anything obviously wrong with the article or methodology.

Maybe consider including the results of others' analyses alongside yours? Even more interesting would be a deep-dive into why they disagree. (Adventures in interpretation) Also maybe do a PCA and show scatter plots of the first two PCs for each doc? I'm no expert, but these could be fun avenues to explore.

You could also go super crazy and try to do an LDA (may have to go beyond syntax and lex). Assume each document is a mixture of author influence. :)

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#13

Post by supermdguy »

a-dub wrote: post #10
blt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you choose an unsupervised method to solve a classification problem?

There's no ground truth. :) They were written under a common psuedonym.

Couldn't works known to be written by hypothesis authors be used to train a supervised classifier?

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#14

Post by jonluca »

supermdguy wrote: post #13
a-dub wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no ground truth. :) They were written under a common psuedonym.

Couldn't works known to be written by hypothesis authors be used to train a supervised classifier?

That thought crossed my mind. I was thinking of trying to get a training set and teaching these models based on previous works by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton. However a lot of what I found for each of them was behind a paywall, or too hard to grep through to actually get the data. For instance all I could find in my (admittedly superficial) digging on John Jay was a book by UVA called "The Selected Papers of John Jay". It costs $90 and contains correspondence both too and from John Jay. It seemed like too much overhead for a weekend project so I just settled on unsupervised.

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#15

Post by oh_sigh »

swalsh wrote: post #4

I did a similar exercise, and then applied it to the Titor posts. Turns out Alexander Hamilton is John Titor.

The best you could say is that of all the Federalist paper authors, AH writes most similarly to John Titor. But really, we all know Titor is Larry Haber.

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#16

Post by tonysdg »

jonluca wrote: post #14
supermdguy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't works known to be written by hypothesis authors be used to train a supervised classifier?

That thought crossed my mind. I was thinking of trying to get a training set and teaching these models based on previous works by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton. However a lot of what I found for each of them was behind a paywall, or too hard to grep through to actually get the data. For instance all I could find in my (admittedly superficial) digging on John Jay was a book by UVA called "The Selected Papers of John Jay"…

May be of interese (see "See Also" for James Madison stuff too): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selected_Papers_of_John_...

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#17

Post by nurettin »

jonluca wrote: post #2

This is my first project in unsupervised NLP, so let me know if there's anything obviously wrong with the article or methodology.

How were the properties chosen? Did you do any information gain analysis on them before doing the clustering?

Re: The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering

#19

Post by thepythiccoder1 »

jonluca wrote: post #2

This is my first project in unsupervised NLP, so let me know if there's anything obviously wrong with the article or methodology.

Hmm the issue is that there might be some correlation between the syntactic and lexical similarity and the actual subject matter the authors are talking about.

I've been working on a similar project.

Three things that I would suggest would be

- add documents definitively written by the authors (Maddison, John jay, etc) from outside the federalist papers to your train set.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jay-the-correspondence-and...

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/14, etc

- Add another feature which looks at the frequency of the function (closed class words) such as articles, prepositions etc these are very stylistic and hard for an author to control, they are also independent of the content, this is a classical feature in forensics.

- Add a distractor case to your train and validation set I.e documents written by a non federalist such as Thomas Jefferson and confirm that they don't get clustered into one of the other federalist authors.

If you have questions feel free to tweet me it seems like a cool project @pythiccoder

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