The Epistle to Cangrande through the Lens of computational authorship verification

The Epistle to Cangrande is one of the most debated documents in the production of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. For more than a hundred years scholars have been debating over its real paternity, whether it should be considered a work by Dante or a malicious forgery by an unnamed author. In this work, we try to address this philological problem through the methodologies of computational authorship verification and machine learning, by training a classifier on a dataset of medieval Latin prose texts and by using a set of authorship-related features. Although the project is still in a preliminary phase, the early results seem to confirm the hypothesis of a forgery.