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Overview of PAN’16

New Challenges for Authorship Analysis: Cross-Genre Profiling, Clustering, Diarization, and Obfuscation

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Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction (CLEF 2016)

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the PAN/CLEF evaluation lab. During the last decade, PAN has been established as the main forum of digital text forensic research. PAN 2016 comprises three shared tasks: (i) author identification, addressing author clustering and diarization (or intrinsic plagiarism detection); (ii) author profiling, addressing age and gender prediction from a cross-genre perspective; and (iii) author obfuscation, addressing author masking and obfuscation evaluation. In total, 35 teams participated in all three shared tasks of PAN 2016 and, following the practice of previous editions, software submissions were required and evaluated within the TIRA experimentation framework.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.theguardian.com.

  2. 2.

    http://www.protagon.gr.

  3. 3.

    https://www.ask4food.gr.

  4. 4.

    The term “diarization” originates from the research field speaker diarization, where approaches try to automatically identify, cluster or extract different (parallel) speakers of an audio speech signal like a telephone conversation or a political debate [39].

  5. 5.

    Conforming to previous PAN events.

  6. 6.

    In the four editions of the author profiling shared task we have had respectively 21 (2013: age and gender identification), 10 (2014: age and gender identification in different genre social media), 22 (2015: age and gender identification and personality recognition in Twitter) and 22 (2016: cross-genre age and gender identification) participating teams.

  7. 7.

    The authors of waser16 team found an error in their implementation when performing cross validation.

  8. 8.

    http://ictrc.ac.ir/plagdet/.

  9. 9.

    http://www.autoritas.es/prsoco.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the organizing committees of PAN’s shared tasks Ben Verhoeven, Walter Daelemans, Patrick Juola. Our special thanks go to all of PAN’s participants, to Adobe(http://www.adobe.com) and to MeaningCloud(http://www.meaningcloud.com/) for sponsoring the author profiling shared task award. The work of the first author was partially supported by the SomEMBED TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P MINECO research project and by the Generalitat Valenciana under the grant ALMAMATER (PrometeoII/2014/030). The work of the second author was partially supported by Autoritas Consulting and by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España under grant ECOPORTUNITY IPT-2012-1220-430000.

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Rosso, P., Rangel, F., Potthast, M., Stamatatos, E., Tschuggnall, M., Stein, B. (2016). Overview of PAN’16. In: Fuhr, N., et al. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction. CLEF 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9822. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44564-9_28

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