How Forensic Linguistics Identified J.K. Rowling | Hacker News Reader

How Forensic Linguistics Identified J.K. Rowling

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

135 pointsahmadss69 comments

Correction: Rowling was 'outed' by her lawyer's wife's friend.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/j...

If I was the law firm, I'd fire the lawyer.

I like this line:

    Publishers Little, Brown have since issued a reprint after 
    sales rose 415,000 per cent when the real author was unmasked.

Nice, but this doesn't help the law firm. They cannot keep a secret. Their clients won't expect their leaked secrets to bring them comparable profits.

One would suspect she wasn't doing it for the money...

Funny coincidence that this 'outing' happened just as the book was headed for the clearance bin.

I really doubt that Rowling was doing this for the revenue. She seemed to genuinely want to just write under a different name/genre without any of the craziness that comes with a Rowling book launch.

She doesn't need the money, so this is probably from the publisher.

Given how much damage this whole incident has done to that law firm I seriously doubt any sane law firm would let themselves be put in that position just for a publicity stunt.

Normally intentionally "leaks" are just "anonymous sources" etc. They're very rarely if ever named.

Plus she doesn't need the money, she is one of the richest women in the world. I suspect she wrote under a different name to see if the book would stand on its own without her big name boosting sales.

"she doesn't need the money, she is one of the richest women in the world."

Never underestimate what the rich and super rich will do to get more money.

Does Warran Buffet need more money? Yet he's still trying to make himself richer.

Do all the top CEO's, VCs, and board members in the world "need" more millions and billions? Maybe not. But it hasn't stopped them from trying to further enrich themselves.

Besides, there could be other motivations for this stunt, such as fame or wanting to be talked about or thought of as a certain type of author.

Totally true! I liked what you said there. This view is not cynicism (as some might say), but this is realism :)

Good one!

That is true. But why would her lawyer be willing to risk his reputation to help Rowling to make more money? Just trying to solve this puzzle.

Rowling actively rid herself of cash and fell out of the top 100 richest last year, I think money isn't that important to her.

http://givingpledge.org/pdf/letters/Buffett_Letter.pdf

This is what she is about (Harvard commencement speech): https://youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c

I feel that you're confusing Rowling with her publisher and maybe even her agent.

Does Warran Buffet need more money? Yet he's still trying to make himself richer.

"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."

> she doesn't need the money

Doesn't have to be about money. Success and acclaim as equally addictive.

"just as the book was headed for the clearance bin"

Really? A hardcover that's been out less than 3 months and that got favorable critical attention (and a lot of favorable Amazon reviews before the leak)?

I've heard it had sales of less than 2,000, which last time I checked (a long while ago, I admit) was considered to be OK for the first printing of a hardback and could result in a paperback run.

I welcome someone who knows the current market's number thresholds, not to mention this market segment, which I don't know, to weight in.

those numbers are pretty low. to be considered moderately successful it would probably need to be at least an order of magnitude higher. that being said, it was still early. you never know what could happen. it was reviewed favorably.

Yea my lawyer would be the last person I would expect to leak my secrets.

If I were JK Rowling, I'd complain to the Solicitors Regulation Authority for appropriate discipline.

From their handbook:

"Protection of confidential information is a fundamental feature of your relationship with clients. It exists as a concept both as a matter of law and as a matter of conduct. This duty continues despite the end of the retainer and even after the death of the client."

I am not sure what piece of information you are trying to correct? They made it quite clear in the original article that the leak began when she was outed on twitter, and that they only analysed the book because they were unsure wether they could trust the source or not.

> If I was the law firm, I'd fire the lawyer.

If I was Rowling, I'd fire the law firm if they didn't.

To me it's interesting that this shows just how dangerous Twitter can be to people as their social brain just can't properly comprehend what it is.

20 years ago, the lawyer would have told his wide's friend and she'd have gossiped it to a few other people and 5 years later it would have eventually been a well known secret that would be occasionally alluded to by the columnists of the papers. Rowling could still remain tantalisingly stum and no-one would be much the wiser.

Instead she says it on twitter which feels like a fairly intimate gossip to a few choice friends but in fact is massively public and boom, consequences for the Law firm, the lawyer and huge public embarrassment for the friend.

From a social point of view, the friend was just acting as she'd have acted 20 years ago, but technology is so different now that a simple piece of gossip has had very different consequences.

"I called both of them yesterday and learned not only how the Rowling investigation worked, but about the fascinating world of forensic linguistics."

Cringe.

From my experience (gleaned from dutifully reading every Bitcoin-related article I can get my hands on) I am very wary of reading about any topic which the author admits to just having learnt about yesterday.

The majority of the time, unfortunately, English majors aren't the best at understanding technology.

On the other hand, I didn't know anything about forensic linguistics until reading the article. This is exactly the sort of curiosity and follow-through that I want to see in a journalist.

That's a bit harsh. The article was by Virginia Hughes, who seems a reasonable science writer, who has written for Nature, etc. Fundamentally, that's what science writers do. They learn about new discoveries, figure out what they mean, and explain them to us. There is a lot of bad science writing out there, but I didn't find it to be an example of that.

She has a degree in neuroscience from Brown, so she's not an "English major".

PCA is a pretty neat technique. It's quite old too, invented by Pearson in the early 1900's.

Basically, you find a "vector" that travels along the part of the data with the highest variance. Then you find an orthogonal vector that travels along the part with the next highest variance.

You then have a set of vectors that explain all of the variance, that aren't correlated (because they're orthogonal), and are ranked by how much they explain.

This can be useful in regression to get rid of correlated variables, or you can get rid of some of the low variance components if there are more columns than rows, which breaks OLS regression.

Consider a new town that you want to get to know as quickly as possible. What is the best method? You start with the longest street, then take a left and travel the next longest street, and so on. You can get a pretty good idea about the town without seeing it all.

The analysis of word length is interesting. English has a lot of long, multi-syllabic Latin based words, and also a lot of short Germanic based words. I wonder the extent to which a higher percentage of long words indicates a preference for the Latin and vice versa.

In the 19th century, Lucy Aikin, under the pen name Mary Godolphin, wrote Robinson Crusoe In Words Of One Syllable and a number of other classics for children using only monosyllabic words. Apparently there are over 9000 monosyllabic English words, but writing this way is surprising hard. It's an interesting exercise, but reading the books feels like reading a telegram.

http://collectingchildrensbooks.blogspot.com/2008/04/monosyl...

I wonder how well a machine automated one-syllable rendering would fair (compared to the manual ones). You'd need to use a thesaurus limited to single syllables and ensure the correct meaning was being chosen. Doesn't sound too hard.

Interesting idea! Just filter WordNet's synonym sets of 155,287 words with a list of one-syllable words. (I read there are 9,000+ words, but I can't find a list online at the moment.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

Automatic transformation of text to evade these methods seems feasible (google translate back and forth might be the crude first attempt.) Obviously there might exist more refined methods of identification. In case of a book it is probably hard not to ruin it this way but reviews, posts and such do not require such high standards.

There are a few open source "adversarial stylometry" software projects, check out JStylo/Anonymouth.

http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometr... "Adversarial Stylometry: Circumventing Authorship Recognition to Preserve Privacy and Anonymity" Brennan et al 2013

Machine translation doesn't work at all. Imitation or deliberate changes to style does - but if Rowling were to do that, she would probably sacrifice a lot of quality or effort and it would defeat the apparent point of the experiment (to demonstrate that she wrote good books, as assessed by 'blinded' reviewers).

It is very easy to ruin a book even with manual translation. E.g. Albert Camus's The Stranger was first translated by some old English guy who brought in significant cultural aspects to the book that didn't exist in the french. Google translate is nice enough for the quick grokking of post but it is nowhere close to even the badness of manual.

Note to coldarchon: It seems like you are hellbanned..

Here's a video series I made a couple of years ago on text mining with RapidMiner:

http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2010/11/text-analytics-with...

It's pretty easy to compare document similarity with n-grams of various lengths.

Did some work with a law firm to do something similar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3613734

this is a tough thing to google for. Terms I used a few weeks ago

- stylometry

- authorship attribution/verification

- grammatical analysis, plagiarism detection

Way too much terms like "proof", "fact", "confirmation", "definitely" later on. Isn't something like this always with a lot of assumption and always with a bias from the samples? Everyone could happen to be writing like someone else. There is nothing that definitively makes writing different between people like a fingerprint (which, as I understand it, is biologically highly random).

Analysing sites like HN to see indicators(!) for sockpuppets or generally correlation of likelihood between accounts' writing styles would rock!

Is that really a website that uses a normally sized font and doesn't drown me with ads?

Nah, I must be dreaming.

All of the statistical analyses sound to be fairly easy to beat.

Say you want to pretend to be another author: first build a language model of the target author, then use the model to single out sentences of high perplexity from your writing. Then, have the model "rewrite" your sentences by replacing your words with synonyms of higher n-gram probabilities according to the model. Similar things can be done to fool the character n-gram analyses, or analyses above words (e.g., parses).

I would be interested to see if you actually "felt" like you were reading the original author if something was rewritten this way.

All of the /mentioned/ analyses - those of the first program sound like something you could do in an afternoon, yet it's been worked on for 10 years. I think there are more, and more sophisticated methods than were described.

Pretty cool. Interesting too, since Rowling is probably the most imitated author in the world at the moment. I guess not by published authors, though.

Have there been any instances where "Forensic Linguistics" actually predicted an outcome that wasn't previously suspected and it turned out to be true? All of the examples I've heard of are it "confirming" things already suspected by other means.

Either way it is still an interesting tool and a cool use of technology, but I'd be a lot more impressed if the software were fed the text to a large number of random books and it detected an instance (with very high likelihood) of some famous author writing under a pen name, and then had that confirmed.

Something similar could probably be done with code (if it hasn't been done already). I suppose auto-formatting and checkstyles might mute some things, but I imagine you could still get a read from things like variable names, class names, function length, etc.

That would be an interesting thing to do. But since code usually has a formal grammar, and a relatively simple one at that, plus a far more constrained vocabulary and, like you pointed out, stricter style frameworks, the liberty of the author is way more limited. It might be enough to say that a piece of code hasn't been written by someone in particular, or maybe discern an author among a few coders. But I'd bet it can't be done on the same scale as with literature.

One place where big variations can exist between two programs is in the comments, where vocabulary and grammar aren't as restricted.

I'm curious about the ethics of this. Why is it OK to 'out' someone as the author of a book, but it's not OK to 'out' someone as gay?

Authors are not generally persecuted for being authors.

Tell that to Salman Rushdie.

He is not being persecuted for being an author. He is being persecuted for what he specifically wrote.

So it's OK to expose a person's secrets as long as that person isn't harmed?

Not sure where you're going with this so I'll avoid the obvious snarky counter-examples...but are you arguing that if someone designates something as a secret, it is absolutely wrong to uncover it?

Not sure where i'm going either! I'm just trying figure out whether I would publish the story if I was editor of The Sunday Times.

Clearly there are cases where exposing someone's secret is the wrong course of action (eg. someone being gay).

Clearly there are cases where exposing someone's secret is the right course of action (eg. a corrupt politician)

What I'm interested in is the middle ground - where exposing a secret does not harm the 'owner' of the secret, but also does not really benefit the general public. In such cases shouldn't we respect the wishes of the person who is keeping the secret?

No.

Read the book Voltaire's bastards by John Ralston Saul where he writes about persecution of authors and cartoonists throughout history. PEN Intl also keeps a current list of authors targeted by the state, lawyers, or media. Rowling probably wants to be able to write adult content without it affecting her children's books so used a pen name, because phony conservative media can easily freak out and pressure stores to rip it off shelves. Happened before with other authors.

"Generally", I said.

Authors have never been persecuted on mass for simply being authors. No one refuses jobs, housing, etc because one is an author. Gay people have. Hardly any one keeps being an author secret.

Of course individual authors have been persecuted for specific reasons.

Are you serious? It's not ok to out someone as gay as that could have huge impacts on their life and relationships. Secondly I haven't seen anyone praise the outing of Rowling as the author of this book. I'd be surprised if the lawyer who leaked it didn't get fired.

I don't think either is punishable by law, but if you were a direct friend of that person, it would be a violation of their trust in you in both cases.

The difference is that The Sunday Times probably wouldn't publish a front-page story outing someone as gay.

The Daily Mail on the other hand...

s/b "How Forensic Linguistics Confirmed a Leak about Rowling"

At the same time we can think of the whole thing as a smart marketing plot.

I don't buy this 'outed' story one second.

This is either marketing or fear of public reception of her non-Potter book (imagine the pressure she must have). Either way, this is crap.

A marketing stunt that involves severely damaging a law-firm's reputation?

They could've had anyone leak the info, it doesn't make sense to implicate their law-firm with it. If the publisher did actually set this up, and that law-firm ever finds out it was orchestrated, the publisher is going to be in huge trouble.

Do you really think J.K.Rowling is under pressure by anyone?

Beside, authors like to write under pen names. Stephen King used Richard Bachman for that, but was also outed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

> He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to "load the dice against" Bachman. King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt that he was outed as Bachman too early to know.

Yes, I think that after a huge success (such as Harry Potter), artists are under tremendous pressure to release something greater or at least equivalent. The same is true for startups btw.

Anyway, if you want to believe what marketers want you to believe, that's fine with me, I won't downvote you for that.

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