Style Signatures to Combat Biometric Menagerie in Stylometry

In this paper, we investigate the challenges of using a person's writing style as a cognitive biometric modality by applying Doddington's idea of Biometric menagerie. To the best of our knowledge, biometric menagerie analysis has been on performed on a cognitive biometric modality for the first time. The presence of goats, wolves and lambs in this modality is demonstrated using two publicly available datasets - Blogs and IMDB1M. To combat this challenging problem, we further propose using person-specific features referred to as "Style signatures" which may be better at distinguishing different individuals. Experimental results show that using person-specific Style signatures improve verification by 3.6-5.5% on both datasets.