There is a long-standing debate around the authorship of the Bixby Letter, one of the most famous pieces of correspondence in American history. Despite being signed by President Abraham Lincoln, some historians have claimed that its true author was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary. Analyses of the letter have been inconclusive in part because the text totals only 139 words and is thus far too short to be attributed using standard methods. To test whether Lincoln or Hay wrote this letter, we therefore introduce and apply a new technique for attributing short texts called n-gram tracing. After demonstrating that our method can distinguish between the known writings of Lincoln and Hay with a very high degree of accuracy, we use it to attribute the Bixby Letter, concluding that the text was authored by John Hay – rewriting this one episode in the history of the United States and offering a solution to one of the most persistent problems in authorship attribution.

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使用n-gram追踪归因于Bixby Letter

关于《比克斯比信》（Bixby Letter）的作者，存在着长期的争论，《比克斯比信》是美国历史上最著名的信件之一。尽管已由亚伯拉罕·林肯总统签署，但一些历史学家声称其真正的作者是林肯的私人秘书约翰·海伊。对该字母的分析尚无定论，部分原因是该文本总共只有139个单词，因此太短了，无法使用标准方法进行归类。为了测试Lincoln还是Hay写这封信，因此，我们引入并应用了一种新的归因于短文本的归因技术，称为n-gram跟踪。在证明我们的方法可以非常准确地区分林肯和海伊的已知著作之后，我们将其用于归因于“比克斯比字母”，