The Epistle to Cangrande Through the Lens of Computational Authorship Verification

The Epistle to Cangrande is one of the most controversial among the works of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. For more than a hundred years now, scholars have been debating over its real paternity, i.e., whether it should be considered a true work by Dante or a forgery by an unnamed author. In this work we address this philological problem through the methodologies of (supervised) Computational Authorship Verification, by training a classifier that predicts whether a given work is by Dante Alighieri or not. We discuss the system we have set up for this endeavour, the training set we have assembled, the experimental results we have obtained, and some issues that this work leaves open.