Who Wrote this Document?

Questions of authorship have fascinated historians, theologians, and other scholars for centuries. In recent years statisticians and now at last computer scientists are also addressing these issues. We'll present an overview of the study of authorship attribution, including famous examples such as "The Federalist Papers", the various "Wizard of Oz" books, as well as the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. We'll present results from our own work in applying latent semantic analysis (LSA), a well-known technique in information retrieval, to the authorship attribution problem.