Text Mining in 19th-Century Essays for Investigating a Possible Collaborative Authorship Problem: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

In this work, we use machine learning techniques to address a research question regarding the authorship of two famous essays in the nineteenth century. On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) were published under John Stuart Mill's name, a widely studied nineteenth-century British philosopher. Mill himself attributed them to collaboration with his wife and partner, Harriet Taylor Mill. More than 150 years later, the question remains whether the author of these two canonical texts in the history of political thought was solely John Stuart Mill. Experts are divided on taking John Stuart Mill's attribution at face value, since Harriet Taylor Mill had died in 1858. Addressing this question, we use a dataset consisted in essays of both authors, to train three state-of-the-art classifiers that are able to learn and distinguish the writing style of each author. Then, we use the models built to attribute the two famous essays of disputed authorship to one of the two. From the results, we conclude that the classifiers are able to learn the two classes very well, and they return high accuracies on the validation set. Regarding the test set, most of the models attribute the two essays to John Stuart Mill, however, the contribution of Harriet Taylor Mill is shown for some chunks of text of both essays. These results, we conclude, explain why experts are divided on this particular research question.

Automated summary

This study uses machine learning techniques to investigate the authorship of two famous essays in the nineteenth century. The classifiers trained in this research show that John Stuart Mill is the primary author of the essays, but also highlight the contribution of Harriet Taylor Mill to certain portions of text.