"Who Wrote this Document?"
Charles Nicholas
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
nicholas@umbc.edu
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.
Dr. Nicholas is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. He received the B.S. degree from the University of Michigan - Flint in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University in 1982 and 1988, respectively. In addition to his appointment at UMBC, Dr. Nicholas has held appointments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He spent academic year 1996-97 on sabbatical at the National Security Agency.
Dr. Nicholas' research interests include electronic document processing, information retrieval, and software Engineering. His work has been funded by a number of agencies, including NASA, Maryland Industrial Partnerships, DARPA, AFOSR, and the Department of Defense. Dr. Nicholas has served five times as the General Chair of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). He also twice chaired the Workshop on Digital Document Processing. Dr. Nicholas is a member of the Board of Directors of UMBC Training Centers.
