Does Burrows' Delta really confirm that Rowling and Galbraith are the same author?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Burrows' Delta method for author attribution, specifically testing its reliability on modern texts similar to those in the Rowling-Galbraith case.

Contribution

The study critically assesses Burrows' Delta using contemporary texts, addressing its applicability and limitations in author attribution tasks.

Findings

Burrows' Delta shows limited reliability on modern texts

The method's effectiveness varies with genre and text type

Results suggest need for alternative or supplementary methods

Abstract

The stylo package includes a frequency table that can be used to calculate distances between texts and thus independently solve the problem of attribution of The Cuckoo's Calling, a novel that J.K. Rowling said she wrote. However, the set of texts for this table is very vulnerable to criticism. The authors there are not modern, they wrote in a different genre. I set out to test the performance of the method on texts that are more relevant to the research question.