# The Sensitivity of Word Embeddings-based Author Detection Models to Semantic-preserving Adversarial Perturbations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11917/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09096/) (2016)
- [Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06201/) (2018)
- [The Limitations of Stylometry for Detecting Machine-Generated Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09805/) (2019)
- [Variational Pretraining for Semi-supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02242/) (2019)
- [Detecting and Characterizing Bots that Commit Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03172/) (2020)
- [Author2Vec: A Framework for Generating User Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11627/) (2020)
- [Towards Improved Model Design for Authorship Identification: A Survey on Writing Style Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14445/) (2020)
- [A Machine Learning Framework for Authorship Identification From Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10204/) (2019)
- [An Innovative Word Encoding Method For Text Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04146/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Authorship analysis is an important subject in the field of natural language processing. It allows the detection of the most likely writer of articles, news, books, or messages. This technique has multiple uses in tasks related to authorship attribution, detection of plagiarism, style analysis, sources of misinformation, etc. The focus of this paper is to explore the limitations and sensitiveness of established approaches to adversarial manipulations of inputs. To this end, and using those established techniques, we first developed an experimental frame-work for author detection and input perturbations. Next, we experimentally evaluated the performance of the authorship detection model to a collection of semantic-preserving adversarial perturbations of input narratives. Finally, we compare and analyze the effects of different perturbation strategies, input and model configurations, and the effects of these on the author detection model.