NSF Org:	CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient:	ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Initial Amendment Date:	May 16, 2008
Latest Amendment Date:	March 13, 2009
Award Number:	0751198
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Tatiana Korelsky CNS  Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE  Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date:	August 1, 2008
End Date:	January 31, 2011 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$0.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$53,798.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2008 = $41,798.00 FY 2009 = $12,000.00
History of Investigator:	Shlomo Argamon (Principal Investigator) argamon@iit.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	Illinois Institute of Technology 10 W 35TH ST CHICAGO IL  US  60616-3717 (312)567-3035
Sponsor Congressional District:	01
Primary Place of Performance:	Illinois Institute of Technology 10 W 35TH ST CHICAGO IL  US  60616-3717
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	E2NDENMDUEG8
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s):	Info Integration & Informatics, Robust Intelligence
Primary Program Source:	01000809DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01000910DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s):	9178, 9218, 9251, HPCC
Program Element Code(s):	736400, 749500
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.070

ABSTRACT

Homeland security and the criminal and civil justice systems increasingly require reliable and valid methods for automatically identifying the authors of anonymous documents. Further demand for effective author attribution arises from fields as diverse as computer forensics and literary studies. However, despite the clear and growing need for methodological research in this area, there are as yet no standard test suites for authorship attribution, and hence no agreed upon ways to compare research results and validate techniques. This situation, combined with the highly interdisciplinary nature of the field, has led to much redundant and sometimes unsound research.

The goal of this project, therefore, is to develop standards and procedures for annotating corpora for use in authorship attribution research and evaluating the results of such research. To this end, the PIs are developing both a large corpus of emails annotated with information about email authors and recipients (including both identity and sociodemographic information), and a suite of testbed attribution tasks based on this corpus. The corpus will form the basis of a research community evaluation exercise which is being run as part of the project, which serves three purposes ? providing baseline results for future authorship research, integrating the currently diverse research community, and most importantly, ensuring the quality of the resulting authorship corpus annotation standards and evaluation procedures.

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