Authorship Attribution on an Afrikaans Corpus using Burrows Delta

Stylometry is often adopted to solve aspects of authorship through the use of computational techniques to quantify the style of a given author. Author Attribution leverages Stylometry to assign an author to an unknown document by assessing the writing patterns of various authors within a corpus. Author Attribute has several applications, such as plagiarism detection and cybercrime. There are many advanced techniques to perform Author Attribution, such as Burrow’s Delta, which computes the distance between two documents by assessing the most common words between the documents. There is a plethora of research on Burrows Delta across several languages. However, these are outside of South African context, a country with 11 official languages, including Afrikaans-a language with roots in Dutch and spoken by 12% of the South African population, and with a rich literary history. This article explores the effectiveness of Burrows Delta on a corpus of Afrikaans novels.