Author Representation Strategies for Zero-Shot Authorship Attribution: A Comparative Study of LLM-Based and Embedding-Based Approaches

Authorship Attribution (AA) requires capturing fine-grained stylistic characteristics, making it particularly challenging in zero-shot (ZS) settings where no task-specific supervision is available. In this work, we investigate the effect of author representations on ZS AA by evaluating a label-only prompting baseline together with three author representation strategies: representative writing samples, LLM-generated descriptions, and style embeddings (LISA). The first three approaches perform attribution using LLM prompting, while the embedding-based approach uses style embeddings with cosine similarity. We investigate the influence of prompt design and propose a two-stage embedding-based attribution framework that combines candidate space reduction with embedding-dimension selection. The r