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EMNLP Findings2023

Who Wrote it and Why? Prompting Large-Language Models for Authorship Verification

Chia-Yu Hung, Zhiqiang Hu, Yujia Hu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Abstract

Authorship verification (AV) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, with applications in forensic analysis, plagiarism detection, and identification of deceptive content. Existing AV techniques, including traditional stylometric and deep learning approaches, face limitations in terms of data requirements and lack of explainability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes PromptAV, a novel technique that leverages Large-Language Models (LLMs) for AV by providing step-by-step stylometric explanation prompts. PromptAV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, operates effectively with limited training data, and enhances interpretability through intuitive explanations, showcasing its potential as an effective and interpretable solution for the AV task.

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. CROSSNEWS: A Cross-Genre Authorship Verification and Attribution BenchmarkMarcus Ma, Duong Minh Le, Junmo Kang, Yao Dou et al.AAAI 2025 · 3 citations
  2. Unraveling Interwoven Roles of Large Language Models in Authorship Privacy: Obfuscation, Mimicking, and VerificationTuc Nguyen, Yifan Hu, Thai LeEMNLP 2025
  3. De-Anonymization at Scale via Tournament-Style AttributionLirui Zhang, Huishuai ZhangACL 2026

Builds on5

  1. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
  2. Large Language Models are Zero-Shot ReasonersTakeshi Kojima, Shixiang Shane Gu, Machel Reid, Yutaka Matsuo et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 8,168 citations
  3. Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-shot Performance of Language ModelsZihao Zhao, Eric Wallace, Shi Feng, Dan Klein et al.ICML 2021 · 1,843 citations
  4. Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language ModelsLei Wang, Wanyu Xu, Yihuai Lan, Zhiqiang Hu et al.ACL 2023 · 249 citations
  5. A Girl Has A Name: Detecting Authorship ObfuscationAsad Mahmood, Zubair Shafiq, Padmini SrinivasanACL 2020 · 1 citation

Related papers

  1. Can Large Language Models Identify Authorship?Baixiang Huang, Canyu Chen, Kai ShuEMNLP Findings 2024 · 30 citations
  2. Residualized Similarity for Faithfully Explainable Authorship VerificationPeter Zeng, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Jihu Mun, Gourab Dey et al.EMNLP Findings 2025
  3. A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship AttributionZhengmian Hu, Tong Zheng, Heng HuangEMNLP 2024 · 1 citation
  4. Interpreting Style Representations via Style-Eliciting PromptsJunghwan Kim, David JurgensACL Findings 2026
  5. PromptCARE: Prompt Copyright Protection by Watermark Injection and VerificationHongwei Yao, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, Kui RenS&P 2024 · 43 citations
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