  In practice, training language models for individual authors is often
expensive because of limited data resources. In such cases, Neural Network
Language Models (NNLMs), generally outperform the traditional non-parametric
N-gram models. Here we investigate the performance of a feed-forward NNLM on an
authorship attribution problem, with moderate author set size and relatively
limited data. We also consider how the text topics impact performance. Compared
with a well-constructed N-gram baseline method with Kneser-Ney smoothing, the
proposed method achieves nearly 2:5% reduction in perplexity and increases
author classification accuracy by 3:43% on average, given as few as 5 test
sentences. The performance is very competitive with the state of the art in
terms of accuracy and demand on test data. The source code, preprocessed
datasets, a detailed description of the methodology and results are available
at https://github.com/zge/authorship-attribution.
