Publications and Research

Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2-2019

Abstract

For those who write anonymously, particularly for safety reasons, authorship attribution poses a threat. Nondescript, my web app, guides writers in achieving stylometric obfuscation in order to preserve anonymity. The app runs simulations of authorship attribution scenarios by analyzing the user’s linguistic features. In this paper, I will describe the conception of the Nondescript app; discuss related work; and present the results of a user study. Most users in the study were able to anonymize their writing in at least 5 out of 10 authorship attribution scenarios. Users rated the anonymization process an average of 3.6 out of 5 in terms of ease of use. This work-in-progress project is situated in two domains: privacy technologies and computational linguistics.

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