arXiv:1402.3405v1 [cs.CL] 14 Feb 2014 This paper proposes to perform authorship analysis using the Fast Com- pression Distance (FCD), a similarity measure based on compression with dictionaries directly extracted from the written texts. The FCD computes a similarity between two documents through an effective binary search on the intersection set between the two related dictionaries. In the reported experi- ments the proposed method is applied to documents which are heterogeneous in style, written in five different languages and coming from different histor- ical periods. Results are comparable to the state of the art and outperform traditional compression-based methods. Keywords: Authorship Analysis, Data Compression, Similarity Measure 7 Preprint submitted to Pattern Recognition Letters February 17, 2014 1. Introduction 8 The task of automatically recognizing the author of a given text finds 9 several uses in practical applications, ranging from authorship attribution to 10 plagiarism detection, and it is a challenging one (Stamatatos, 2009). While 11 the structure of a document can be easily interpreted by a machine, the 12 Abstract 6 Daniele Cerra, Mihai Datcu, and Peter Reinartz 2 German Aerospace Center (DLR), Muenchner str. 20, 82234 Wessling, Germany 3 Corresponding author’s email: daniele.cerra@dlr.de, 4 phone: +49 8153 28-1496, fax: +49 8153 28-1444. 5 Authorship Analysis based on Data Compression 1