Heuristic Authorship Obfuscation

Janek Bevendorff, Martin Potthast, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein


Abstract
Authorship verification is the task of determining whether two texts were written by the same author. We deal with the adversary task, called authorship obfuscation: preventing verification by altering a to-be-obfuscated text. Our new obfuscation approach (1) models writing style difference as the Jensen-Shannon distance between the character n-gram distributions of texts, and (2) manipulates an author’s subconsciously encoded writing style in a sophisticated manner using heuristic search. To obfuscate, we analyze the huge space of textual variants for a paraphrased version of the to-be-obfuscated text that has a sufficient Jensen-Shannon distance at minimal costs in terms of text quality. We analyze, quantify, and illustrate the rationale of this approach, define paraphrasing operators, derive obfuscation thresholds, and develop an effective obfuscation framework. Our authorship obfuscation approach defeats state-of-the-art verification approaches, including unmasking and compression models, while keeping text changes at a minimum.
Anthology ID:
P19-1104
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1098–1108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1104
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1104
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Janek Bevendorff, Martin Potthast, Matthias Hagen, and Benno Stein. 2019. Heuristic Authorship Obfuscation. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1098–1108, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Heuristic Authorship Obfuscation (Bevendorff et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1104.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1104.mp4
Code
 webis-de/acl-19