How Far Can Classical NLP Go? From Bag-of-Words to Stacking on Spooky Author Identification

This article explores classical NLP techniques for Kaggle's Spooky Author Identification task, comparing baselines like Vowpal Wabbit and TF-IDF/NB-SVM with a tuned stacked ensemble. It surveys compact representations including Bag-of-Words, BM25, Word2Vec, and FastText to assess their effectiveness in author attribution. The experiment demonstrates the potential of classical methods without deep learning.