Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution

AbstractRecent 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.