Narrative
Forensic Linguistics is the application of linguistics to forensic problems. One of these problems is the analysis of anonymous documents to determine their authorship, such as in cases of texts that happen to become evidence in court cases. With the increase in use of the internet in modern times, more and more crimes are committed online, for example on the dark web, where the clues left by the perpetrators are predominantly linguistic. My research is focused on quantifying and understanding individuality in language and on applying this knowledge to help the delivery of justice in cases involving disputed documents. My research is applied regularly to either help law enforcement to investigate serious crimes or is presented as evidence in court.| Impact date | 2016 |
|---|---|
| Category of impact | Legal impacts, Societal impacts |
| Impact level | Engagement |
Related content
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Activities
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The use of the likelihood ratio in forensic authorship analysis cases
Activity: Participating in or organising event(s) › Participating in a conference, workshop, exhibition, performance, inquiry, course etc › Research
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Grammar is a biometric
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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How Linguistics can help to eliminate unnecessary complexity in modern Natural Language Processing
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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The use of the likelihood ratio in forensic authorship verification cases
Activity: Participating in or organising event(s) › Organising a conference, workshop, exhibition, performance, inquiry, course etc › Research
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Forensic Linguistics Casework group
Activity: Participating in or organising event(s) › Organising a conference, workshop, exhibition, performance, inquiry, course etc › Teaching and Research
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The likelihood ratio framework in forensic authorship analysis
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Teaching
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4th European Conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguists
Activity: Participating in or organising event(s) › Participating in a conference, workshop, exhibition, performance, inquiry, course etc › Research
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Authorship Analysis for Investigative and Forensic Purposes
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Teaching
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A forensic linguistic analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Forensic authorship analysis and the Dickens Code Project
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Authorship profiling for forensic purposes
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Forensic applications of sociolinguistics
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Small language models for human-interpretable authorship analysis
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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The use of forensic linguistics for investigative purposes
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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The use of authorship profiling evidence in court
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Analysis of a disputed police statement
Activity: Consultancy, spin-outs, CPD & licensing › Consultancy & Services › Research
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The Ayia Napa rape statements
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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Forensic authorship profiling as court evidence: The Ayia Napa rape statements
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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From Jack the Ripper to cybercrime: linguistics as a forensic science
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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A more interpretable method for the analysis of an author’s language
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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The likelihood of lexicogrammatical overlap
Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation › Research
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Analysis of a disputed set of poems
Activity: Consultancy, spin-outs, CPD & licensing › Consultancy & Services › Research
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International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (External organisation)
Activity: Membership › Membership of professional association › Research
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The Ayia Napa statements
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk › Research
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International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (External organisation)
Activity: Membership › Membership of committee › Research
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Experimental evidence on the individuality of lexicogrammar
Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation › Research
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Research output
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Likelihood ratio based authorship verification methods applied to forensic voice comparison tasks
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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The Statistical Approximation Hypothesis: A Cognitive Linguistic explanation for the effectiveness of function word frequency
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Corpus Analysis in Forensic Linguistics
Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding › Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary › peer-review
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Developing forensic authorship profiling
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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A Theory of Linguistic Individuality for Authorship Analysis
Research output: Book/Report › Book › peer-review
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A formal model of lexicogrammatical individuality
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Evaluating the usefulness of embedding phonetic representations into an authorship analysis-based framework for the comparison of spoken data
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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An authorship analysis of the Jack the Ripper letters
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Linguistic Individuality in Lexicogrammatical Alternations
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Production vs Perception: The Role of Individuality in Usage-Based Grammar Induction
Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review
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Why do function word frequencies vary across individuals? Evidence in favour of The Statistical Approximation Hypothesis
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Cognitive Linguistic forensic authorship analysis using the likelihood ratio framework
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Forensic authorship analysis of the Ayia Napa rape statements
Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
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Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Idiolect: An R package for forensic authorship analysis
Research output: Non-textual form › Software
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The idiolectal information in long character n-grams: An experiment using paraphrasing
Research output: Contribution to conference › Abstract › peer-review
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Validation in Forensic Text Comparison: Issues and Opportunities
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Register variation in malicious forensic texts
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Bridging the gap between stylistic and cognitive approaches to authorship analysis using Systemic Functional Linguistics and multidimensional analysis
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Attributing the Bixby Letter using n-gram tracing
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Press/Media
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VARIOUS MEDIA: Jack the Ripper letter mystery solved by Manchester researcher
Press/Media: Research
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Forensic Linguistic evidence for the Ayia Napa rape case
Press/Media: Other
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The Dickens Code project and forensic authorship analysis
Press/Media: Blogs and social media
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Datasets
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The Jack the Ripper Corpus
Dataset
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Prizes
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IAFPA Research Grant
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)