Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution
Milad Alshomary, Narutatsu Ri, Marianna Apidianaki, Ajay Patel, Smaranda Muresan, Kathleen McKeown
Abstract
Recent state-of-the-art authorship attribution methods learn authorship representations of text in a latent, uninterpretable space, which hinders their usability in real-world applications. We propose a novel approach for interpreting learned embeddings by identifying representative points in the latent space and leveraging large language models to generate informative natural language descriptions of the writing style associated with each point. We evaluate the alignment between our interpretable and latent spaces and demonstrate superior prediction agreement over baseline methods. Additionally, we conduct a human evaluation to assess the quality of these style descriptions and validate their utility in explaining the latent space. Finally, we show that human performance on the challenging authorship attribution task improves by +20% on average when aided with explanations from our method.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{alshomary-etal-2025-latent,
title = "Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution",
author = "Alshomary, Milad and
Ri, Narutatsu and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Patel, Ajay and
Muresan, Smaranda and
McKeown, Kathleen",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.75/",
pages = "1124--1135"
}