Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution

Milad Alshomary, Narutatsu Ri, Marianna Apidianaki, Ajay Patel, Smaranda Muresan, Kathleen McKeown


Abstract
Recent state-of-the-art authorship attribution methods learn authorship representations of text in a latent, uninterpretable space, which hinders their usability in real-world applications. We propose a novel approach for interpreting learned embeddings by identifying representative points in the latent space and leveraging large language models to generate informative natural language descriptions of the writing style associated with each point. We evaluate the alignment between our interpretable and latent spaces and demonstrate superior prediction agreement over baseline methods. Additionally, we conduct a human evaluation to assess the quality of these style descriptions and validate their utility in explaining the latent space. Finally, we show that human performance on the challenging authorship attribution task improves by +20% on average when aided with explanations from our method.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.75
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1124–1135
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.75/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milad Alshomary, Narutatsu Ri, Marianna Apidianaki, Ajay Patel, Smaranda Muresan, and Kathleen McKeown. 2025. Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1124–1135, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution (Alshomary et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.75.pdf