Developing and Analyzing a Spanish Corpus for Forensic Purposes

Abstract

In this paper, the methods for developing a database of Spanish writing that can be used for forensic linguistic research are presented, including our data collection procedures. Specifically, the main instrument used for data collection has been translated into Spanish and adapted from Chaski (2001). It consists of ten tasks, by means of which the subjects are asked to write formal and informal texts about different topics. To date, 93 undergraduates from Spanish universities have already participated in the study and prisoners convicted of gender-based abuse have participated. A twofold analysis has been performed, since the data collected have been approached from a semantic and a morphosyntactic perspective. Regarding the semantic analysis, psycholinguistic categories have been used, many of them taken from the LIWC dictionary (Pennebaker et al., 2001). In order to obtain a more comprehensive depiction of the linguistic data, some other ad-hoc categories have been created, based on the corpus itself, using a double-check method for their validation so as to ensure inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, as regards morphosyntactic analysis, the natural language processing tool ALIAS TATTLER is being developed for Spanish. Results shows that is it possible to differentiate non-abusers from abusers with strong accuracy based on linguistic features.