One of the earliest types of features, and one that still works quite well for authorship analysis, is to use function words in a bag-of-words model. Function words are words that have little meaning on their own, but are required for creating (English) sentences. For example, the words this and which are words that are really only defined by what they do within a sentence, rather than their meaning in themselves. Contrast this with a content word such as tiger, which has an explicit meaning and invokes imagery of a large cat when used in a sentence.

Function words are not always clearly clarified. A good rule of thumb is to choose the most frequent words in usage (over all possible documents, not just ones from the same author). Typically, the more frequently a word is used, the better it is for authorship analysis. In contrast, the less frequently a word is used, the better it is for content-based text mining, such as in the next chapter, where we look at the topic of different...