I would like to invite you all to participate in an Ad-hoc Authorship Attribution Competition, to be held as part of the 2004 Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ALLC/ACH 2004). My hope is to establish a collection of the best techniques and methods in inferring document authorship from participants around the world. 

    Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in interest in the problem of determining the author of a disputed or unknown document using computer-aided or even complete computer-driven analysis. We hope to bring together the users and the developers of this technology to share and to compare their methods and results. This competition will help to create a set of ``best practices'' in authorship attribution that can standardize analyses and spur the development of new and improved methods. 

    The competition will be run using a set of specially developed corpora (of various sorts) that will be distributed ``anonymously'' to participating researchers. Researchers will be asked to submit their programs which will analyze the documents and determine who wrote each individual document. The results will be tabulated and are planned to be presented as a special session of the ALLC/ACH meeting in Goteborg, Sweden (June 11-16, 2004). Participation in this conference will be encouraged but not required. 

    Unfortunately, the University of Virginia has had to back away from their earlier support in terms of publishing an edited volume of papers and software describing the various methods. I am currently discussing this project with other publishers, as I consider this volume to be an important way of getting this kind of enabling technology into the hands of scholars and researchers who need it. Participants in the competition will be invited to submit to this volume. Technical support for developing, testing, and standardizing software will be available from the Digital Humanities Developer's Consortium to help in the production of high quality, end-user friendly software to encourage use and reuse of the methods presented.