ID of anonymous posters via word analysis?

In article <Pine.3.87.9310291032.A24998-0100000@crl.crl.com> arthurc@crl.crl.com writes:
 >   I think that identification by buzzwords, habitual misspellings, etc. 
 > could be used to identify anonymous posters. Sentence structure is also 
 > revealing. Le style, c'est l'homme, said Voltaire.  Of course, it all 
 > comes down to how much time and effort you want to put into proving, say, 
 > that SBoxx=LDetweiler.

I had a go at this just for fun when an8785 was doing his thing.  I'm
pretty sure I identified him correctly in the end.  (The guy I thought
it was, when I asked him, said 'If I were I wouldn't tell you', whereas
all the other people I suspected but not as strongly all denied it
violently, heh heh heh)

I think this sort of analysis could be automated to a reasonable
extent, to cut out the TypeI errors that the guys who did Shakespeare/Bacon
analysis made.  It's very easy to fool yourself if you don't have predefined
criteria of comparison and a rigid marking scheme.

I'm fairly sure that a sufficiently detailed analysis looking at enough
different points of style would still catch someone's fingerprint even if
they went out of their way to disguise their postings.  The only approach
I can think of that would be successful in hiding individual style is for
person A to write something, person B reads it quickly, then attempts to
write something with the same semantic content, but of course it will
have B's grammar and phraseology and punctuation idiosyncracies.  (And
this only works if B is not a net poster, otherwise you recognise B and
work out who his friends are :-) )

G
-- 
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One could also imagine a 'symantic scrambler' analogous to the word 
analysis program, but designed to defeat it, by randomly altering the 
syntax of a post. The output might have to be tweaked afterwards, in 
order to restore some sense to it, but it would be a sort of ascii 
version of the cutting the words out of magazines style of ransom note.

It might just be a huge lookup table of canned phrases that get swapped 
in to replace your 'unique,' identifiable sentences. It seems like a 
dedicated global search and replace, combined with some sort of die throw 
to dictate sentence structure might be enough to screw up word analysis, 
actually...

Actually, the scrambler wouldn't have to be random--it could always 
produce output with the same word analysis signature. As long as a bunch 
of people were using it, or had access to it, you'd have deniability.


E. Jay O'Connell____________________________________________________
"God does not play dice with the Universe"--A Einstein
"No, she plays SuperScratch-Card Wingo (TM)"--Me.
____________________________________________________________________
Information Wants to Be Free      PGP Public Key available by Finger

E. Jay O'Connell <ejo@world.std.com> wrote:

> It might just be a huge lookup table of canned phrases that get
> swapped in to replace your 'unique,' identifiable sentences. It seems
> like a dedicated global search and replace, combined with some sort
> of die throw to dictate sentence structure might be enough to screw
> up word analysis, actually...
>
> Actually, the scrambler wouldn't have to be random--it could
> always produce output with the same word analysis signature. As
> long as a bunch of people were using it, or had access to it, you'd
> have deniability.

I've seen a few programs which do this, but they were mostly for humor
value.  The program would pick out certain words or phrases and swap the
with other words of phrases in its database, mostly cliches and other
strange word usage.  (such as "Like, wow, gag me with a spoon" etc...)  
The output was rather humorus, but most of the meaning was still
preserved.  I saw several of them used awhile ago during the Jon Fether
fiasco on the usenet (If any of you saw that - a little 14-year old got
daddy's modem and found a free internet site, and then started flamewars
on several usenet groups.  A few people took his flame posts and ran
then thru their "filters" and then re-posted them.)

Anyway, it probably wouldn't be too hard to just swap words with
synonyms or reorder or replace certain prepositional phrases.