---
title: "Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components — Koppel 2011"
description: "The test bed is the Hebrew Bible. 21 references, cited by 11 papers here."
authors: ["Moshe Koppel", "Navot Akiva", "Idan Dershowitz", "Nachum Dershowitz"]
year: 2011
venue: "Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P11-1136/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/koppel-2011-unsupervised-decomposition-document-into-authorial/"
---
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# Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components

**Authors:** [Moshe Koppel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/moshe-koppel/); Navot Akiva; Idan Dershowitz; [Nachum Dershowitz](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nachum-dershowitz/) · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the ACL: Human Language Technologies, pp. 1356–1364 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P11-1136](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1136/) · library `aclbulk-2011-koppel-unsupervised-decomposition-document-into-authorial` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**35** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2123529824) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**11** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/koppel-2011-unsupervised-decomposition-document-into-authorial/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) · published by [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1136/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1136.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2123529824)

**Authors (4)**

1. [Moshe Koppel](https://openalex.org/A5019908505) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145200175) · h 37 · 6,949 citations · 150 works
2. [Navot Akiva](https://openalex.org/A5000836036) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3332806) · h 10 · 313 citations · 24 works
3. [Idan Dershowitz](https://openalex.org/A5086305897) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5310-8504) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1923479) · h 6 · 161 citations · 21 works
4. [Nachum Dershowitz](https://openalex.org/A5039993352) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0363-2735) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1759551) · h 43 · 8,852 citations · 511 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The question is whether the authorial layers of a composite text can be separated without any labelled example. The test bed is the Hebrew Bible. Two books (Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and later Isaiah, Job and Proverbs) are "munged" into one artificial document, and the method must recover the two books. Clustering chapters by bag-of-words gives a normalised majority diagonal (NMD) of 51.5%, close to the chance floor of 50%. Clustering by synonym choice, where synsets come from words that the King James translation renders identically, gives 91 of 100 chapters on the right side. A two-stage method uses the reliable core of those clusters as training data for an SVM on generic words, and reaches 99 of 100. On the munged pairs most verses are assigned correctly, and the split agrees with the Priestly and non-Priestly consensus for over 90% of Pentateuch verses where a consensus exists.

## Ideas

- I3. A negative control: munge two books of known authorship and check that the method recovers them, with the naive 51.5% as the floor that must be beaten. A test that cannot show failure is not a gate; the munged set is for tests only and is not part of any release.

## For Mova

- I1. Synonym choice without a thesaurus: a synset is a set of source words that one translation renders with the same English word, with the concordance giving the senses. For Mova, the lemmas and Strong's numbers in the dictionary builder could give Hebrew synsets, and the test is whether synonym choice separates the layers of the Pentateuch in [languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/).
- I2. A two-stage design as a general method: a high-precision partial clustering from a sparse, rule-like feature set, then a small classifier on a denser feature set trained only on the cores. This fits the rule-first design of Mova, since the sparse stage can be a set of rules and the dense stage a small model that can be inspected.

I1 goes into [languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/) and `tools/macula`. I2 is a design note for `world`, where clusters of text can be built on a rule-first basis. I3 is a test under `tools/hbo` or `tools/macula`, with a dated run.

## Institutions

[🎓**Bar-Ilan University** Ramat Gan · Israel 102 works · 17,587 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/bar-ilan-university/) · [🎓**Tel Aviv University** Tel Aviv · Israel 54 works · 7,966 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/tel-aviv-university/) · [🎓**Hebrew University of Jerusalem** Jerusalem · Israel 42 works · 8,354 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/hebrew-university-of-jerusalem/)

📚 Shelves 5[Computer Science · 7,204 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · [Artificial Intelligence · 7,042 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · [Arts and Humanities · 7,381 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · [Language and Linguistics · 7,325 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · [Literature and Literary Theory · 223 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/literature-and-literary-theory/)

🧭 Topics 2[Hebrew & Aramaic · 474 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/hebrew-aramaic/) · [Biblical Hebrew · 254 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/biblical-hebrew/)

## Cite

Cite as Moshe Koppel, Navot Akiva, Idan Dershowitz and Nachum Dershowitz. 2011. Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{koppel2011unsupervised,
  title = {{Unsupervised Decomposition of a Document into Authorial Components}},
  author = {Moshe Koppel, Navot Akiva, Idan Dershowitz and Nachum Dershowitz},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P11-1136/}
}
```

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Updated 23 October 2026