Forensic Linguistics Research Articles

Forensic Valuation of Intellectual Property

Valuation of objects of intellectual property can be important when considering civil disputes, criminal cases of copyright and related rights infringements, criminal bankruptcies, cases of administrative offenses (violations of copyright and related rights, inventor’s and patent rights). At present, there is no generally accepted and accessible methodology of forensic valuation of intellectual property items.The main aspects of the forensic valuation of intellectual property are reviewed. It is shown that when assessing the value of intellectual property special knowledge should be applied in the field of forensic merchandising expertise, forensic economics, as well as other kinds and types of forensic expertise according to the characteristics of the intellectual property in question: forensic trace evidence analysis, computer forensics, forensic linguistics, forensic materials analysis, etc. It is necessary to develop and implement a new type of forensic examination in the forensic institutions of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation - forensic examination of intellectual property which will also include the value assessment of such objects.

MODERN ONLINE PLATFORMS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN TEACHING LINGUISTICS IN THE US HIGHER EDUCATION PRACTICE

The article deals with the problem of applying modern online platforms and digital technologies to teaching linguistics students in the US experience. It has been highlighted that nowadays it is imperative to discover new approaches to enhancing the quality of education process, in particular, professional training in linguistics, using prominent achievements of the leading countries, namely, the USA. The country is worldwide recognized as the main centre of linguistics and applies the most advanced and innovative technologies to teaching linguistics. Recent researches and publications on the topic have been analyzed. It has been found that digital learning is viewed in different contexts, may have different terms and interpretations, however most scholars agree it promotes digitality of the education process and sets innovative trends in the education of the future. It has been stated that future linguists should be able to effectively apply linguistic theories and methods for fulfilling standard professional tasks, in particular developing scientific and technical and special terminology, linguistic software, conducting research in the field of psycholinguistics, forensic linguistics, communicative linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, etc. Therefore, it has been specified that the US experience of professional training in linguistics aims to strengthen the education process with the use of innovative digital technologies so that future linguists may confidently implement the acquired knowledge and skills into professional activities. It has been found that content management systems are widely applied in professional training in linguistics, since they are aimed at making study time more flexible so that the students may efficiently organize their learning and successfully achieve learning goals. It has been clarified that online/distance learning, which includes videoconferencing software and massive open online courses, is actively implemented to eliminate geographic barriers and connect learners all over the world. It has been specified that modern linguistic multimedia laboratories play the leading role in making professional training in linguistics more digital. Based on the research findings, relevant conclusions have been drawn and optimal recommendations have been outlined how to enhance the quality of professional training in linguistics worldwide through applying modern online platforms and digital technologies.

Effects of alcohol and emotions on voice features in Mexican Spanish accented speech: A forensically relevant case study

This is a case study of how alcohol intoxication and emotions affect the speech of a male Mexican Spanish speaker arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, and how his dialectal variety may have influenced the assumption of the arresting officers that alcohol intoxication was revealed by his altered speech patterns. There are still few standards in Forensic Linguistics and Voice Recognition/Identification (cf. the survey by Hollien et al., 2014). We do know, however, that listeners often overestimate the amount of alcohol speakers ingested, sober speakers can successfully mimic drunken speech, and conversely it is possible for a speaker under the influence to sound more sober than s/he actually is by modifying certain parameters (ibid., p. 180). It has also been demonstrated that dialectal differences can impair intelligibility and speaker recognition (Bahr et al. 2002, Betancourt and Bahr, 2010): the present case study analyses the acoustic segmental and suprasegmental aspects of the existing recordings of the arrest, and shows that while the speaker may have been physiologically drunk, he was rather “linguistically sober.” Further correlations are also drawn between dialectal characteristics and “slurred speech,” as well as the influence of emotions and possibly deception on speech rhythm and variations in vocal parameters.This is a case study of how alcohol intoxication and emotions affect the speech of a male Mexican Spanish speaker arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, and how his dialectal variety may have influenced the assumption of the arresting officers that alcohol intoxication was revealed by his altered speech patterns. There are still few standards in Forensic Linguistics and Voice Recognition/Identification (cf. the survey by Hollien et al., 2014). We do know, however, that listeners often overestimate the amount of alcohol speakers ingested, sober speakers can successfully mimic drunken speech, and conversely it is possible for a speaker under the influence to sound more sober than s/he actually is by modifying certain parameters (ibid., p. 180). It has also been demonstrated that dialectal differences can impair intelligibility and speaker recognition (Bahr et al. 2002, Betancourt and Bahr, 2010): the present case study analyses the acoustic segmental and suprasegmental aspects of the existing reco...

Key Aspects in Relation to Forensic Linguistics

The current study explores some key aspects in connection with forensic linguistics covering its discipline. Therefore, this study sheds some light on prominent types of linguistic evidence such as forensic stylistics, forensic phonetics, forensic transcription, discourse analysis, author identification, and more focus on forensic translation. It includes areas directly related to forensic linguistics like software forensic, plagiarism detection, and document examination. Forensic applications with respect to descriptive linguistics involving forensic linguists, the linguistic investigation of authorship, and text types shall be considered as well. Principles and skills needed for forensic translation will be also provided. In conclusion, the present study proposes that judges, lawyers and legal translators and interpreters, and specialized linguists should work together to have better understanding of law issues. They should benefit from the legal oral and written texts and legal translators should provide consultancy and experience towards legal issues and cases. Further suggestions and recommendations will be presented accordingly.

PENGGUNAAN KATA TABU DI MEDIA SOSIAL: KAJIAN LINGUISTIK FORENSIK

The freedom in social media communication have not been responded wisely by the citizen of the net (netizen). Sometimes while expressing themselves in the social media, netizens used the taboo words which potentially break the law. The problems chosen in this research is a type of taboo words used by the netizen and also whether these expressed words have a potential to violate the law. The method to collect the data is “Simak bebas libat cakap“(SBLC), it is a method where there is no active communication between interviewer and interviewee but it is only taken the data from internet, then to transcribe the taken data. The following step is analyzing data which used referential equivalent method, then the results of the analysis were presented informally. The findings showed that taboo words used in social media consisted of: (1) obscene words, (2) vulgar language, and (3) nick name and insult. These taboo words potentially violate the government regulation of the Republic Indonesia number 11 of 2008 concerning electronic information and transactions article 27 paragraph (3) and article 45 paragraph (1) as well as article 310 section (1) and article 311 section (1) of the Indonesian Criminal Code concerning defamation. Therefore, netizens must be careful in the way how communicate. Criminal Code, defamation, forensic linguistics, ITE Law, netizen, social media, taboo

REVEALING MOTIVES AND LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR IN A SUICIDE NOTE

Suicide note, one of noteworthy evidences in forensic linguistics, may inform the suicidal behavior of the notewriter, such as the emotional aspects, messages, expectations, motives, and its genuinity. In this article, words, phrases, and sentences employed in a suicide note left by a married young lady were analyzed using lexical semantics, pragmatic semantics, and relevance theory to uncover messages and underlying motives. The procedures began with tabulating and categorizing the words based on their part of speech to see their prominent linguistic features and conducting twofold analysis, namely lexical semantic analysis to find notewriter’s messages and pragmatic semantic analysis and relevance theory to find the underlying motive. The results of lexical semantic analysis showed that the notewriter left a couple of messages like apologies and requests but in an assertive mode to be carried out by the abandoned parties, while the results of pragmatic semantics analysis and relevance theory showed that the motive of the suicide was feeling of failure in carrying out her role as a housewife. Patriarchal culture that puts women in charge of serving the family is also presumably to take part in encouraging the suicide.

Compilation of malay criminological terms from online news

<p>A Malay language corpus has been established by the Institute of Language and Literature (Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, DBP in Malaysia). Most of the past research on the Malay language corpus has focused on the description, lexicography and translation of the Malay language. However, in the existing literature, there is no list of Malay words that categorizes crime terminologies. This study aims to fill that linguistic gap. First, we aggregated the most frequently used crime terminology words from Malaysian online news sources. Five hundred crime-related words were compiled. No automatic machines were in the initial process, but they were subsequently used to verify the data. Four human coders were used to validate the data and ensure the originality of the semantic understanding of the Malay text. Finally, major crime terminologies were outlined from a set of keywords to serve as taggers in our solution. The ultimate goal of this study is to provide a corpus for forensic linguistics, police investigations, and general crime research. This study has established the first corpus of a criminological text in the Malay language.</p>

CLOSE AND OPEN TASK AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION: A COMPUTATIONAL AUTHORSHIP ANALYSIS

<p>Authorship analysis is one of the areas lies within forensic linguistics where the main task is to investigate the characteristics of a text in terms of its authorship. Specifically, authorship attribution examines the possibility of an author for having written the text by analyzing the author's other works. This experimental research addresses two problems: which author writes which text (using a closed task authorship attribution) and who writes each text (using an open task of authorship attribution). In doing so, this research uses R to do statistical computing employing both stylo() and classify() functions. Based on carried out experiments with 1-grams as a fixed variable, it is concluded that SVM algorithm may be best used in doing closed task authorship attribution for its 100% consistency, whereas for the open task k-NN algorithm may be best used since it reaches 94% consistency. In addition to open class task, stylo() function may perform better than classify() function since stylo() function provides results closer to the actual answer. As the legal system often challenges authorship analysis for not having a valid methodology, analyzing styles using stylometry and measuring the styles computationally may help forensic linguists to provide an adequate analysis for the legal system. Scientifically this research provides a framework of how to do authorship analysis computationally while practically it is projected can be used as a tool to detect plagiarism.</p><p> </p>

طبيعة عمل عالم اللغة الجنائي، قراءة في ثلاث قضايا في تحقيق نسبة النص

The present study attempts to investigate the nature of the work of the forensic linguist to find out the procedural methods used to attribute authorship of texts to their potential owners. The aim is to examine the aspects of the linguistic theory on which the work of the forensic linguist depends, and upon which he may base his assumptions and then verify their validity. To achieve this, the study follows the narrative analysis method, one of the methods of qualitative approach in humanities, which depends on the analysis of the text and tracing the human experience of the forensic linguist in his work and obstacles he encountered. The study deals with three famous cases that occupied the Western judiciary for a period of time. The first is the issue of doubt in the statement of the culprit known as the case of Derek Bentley in Britain, the issue of comparing manuscripts known as the Unabomber, and the issue attributing part of a text to one of its co-authors. It is hoped that the study of these three cases will lead to further research in this neglected area of science in the Arab world.

Identifying Suicide Notes Using Forensic Linguistics and Machine Learning

This paper presents how to identify the characteristic properties of suicide notes using the analysis methods in forensic linguistics and how to apply the knowledge to the machine learning research. For this purpose, a corpus was compiled with Virginia Woolf’s literary works and suicide notes, which contained six texts. Then, each text was analyzed with the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) software. Since the analysis results were complicated, a dimensionality reduction was conducted using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA). In the PCA analysis, it was found that, even though all the texts were written by the same author, the suicide notes were clearly identified from the literary works. The analysis results of LIWC analyses were applied to a machine learning technique (especially a Support Vector Machine; SVM), and the classification accuracy was measured using six real texts and three hypothetical texts. Through the analysis, it was found that the SVM machine identified the suicide notes from the literary works with 100% of accuracy. The current study demonstrates that the linguistic properties of texts can be used to identify the suicides notes from the other types of writings and that they can be used in machine learning research.

Lack of effects of gender on the reading rate of long texts

Among various linguistic and extralinguistic factors which may affect speech tempo, the gender of the speaker has received considerable attention. In a number of publications it has been reported that women tend to read at a slower rate than men. However, other studies cast doubt on these findings and the issue needs further investigation. This paper attempts to compare the reading rate of male and female speakers of English on the basis of selected chapters from audiobooks. The recordings analysed are considerably longer than the samples used in previous research. The rate of speech has been measured using phonemes per second, syllables per second and words per second. The results consistently indicate that gender does not affect reading tempo. They are directly applicable in text-to-speech (TTS) software development and may be useful in other disciplines, such as forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics or education.

Register in computational language research

AbstractShlomo Argamon is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Master of Data Science Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology (USA). In this article, he reflects on the current and potential relationship between register and the field of computational linguistics. He applies his expertise in computational linguistics and machine learning to a variety of problems in natural language processing. These include stylistic variation, forensic linguistics, authorship attribution, and biomedical informatics. He is particularly interested in the linguistic structures used by speakers and writers, including linguistic choices that are influenced by social variables such as age, gender, and register, as well as linguistic choices that are unique or distinctive to the style of individual authors. Argamon has been a pioneer in computational linguistics and NLP research in his efforts to account for and explore register variation. His computational linguistic research on register draws inspiration from Systemic Functional Linguistics, Biber’s multi-dimensional approach to register variation, as well as his own extensive experience accounting for variation within and across text types and authors. Argamon has applied computational methods to text classification and description across registers – including blogs, academic disciplines, and news writing – as well as the interaction between register and other social variables, such as age and gender. His cutting-edge research in these areas is certain to have a lasting impact on the future of computational linguistics and NLP.

Forensic examination of anonymous handwritten documents in order to obtain data on the identity of their author and performer

The anonymous document as an object of forensic research has an information field that is subject to study by three groups of scientific disciplines: handwriting, technical re­search of documents and forensic linguistics. Stability and reproducibility characteristics of handwriting and written speech allows us to identify the author and performer of an anonymous message, as demonstrated by the example of the authorsʼ practice.

ЮРИДИЧЕСКАЯ ЛИНГВИСТИКА И СУДЕБНОЕ РЕЧЕВЕДЕНИЕ: СООТНОШЕНИЕ ОБЪЕКТОВ И ПРЕДМЕТНЫХ ОБЛАСТЕЙ

In the article, differences between the subject areas of forensic linguistics and judicial speech studies are revealed. It is shown that the subject area of forensic linguistics in Russia is determined by the types of lawyers’ professional activity, and the object is juridical discourse. The object of judicial speech studies can be any discourse, and the subject area is determined by a complex of special knowledge that allows identifying the linguistic features that have evidentiary value for legal proceedings, based on reliable scientific facts and obtained with the use of verified expert methods.

A Need Analysis of Forensic Linguistics Teaching Material Development For University

Realizing the university's vision and mission requires teaching materials for the development of education and teaching. The development of forensic linguistic teaching materials is an application that is used to achieve goals, objectives, intention in dealing with various criminal cases that occur in the community. The aim of developing forensic linguistic teaching materials in higher education is an academic need in the current era.. It is a Research and Development Research. It is found that many students are interested to study about forensic linguistics. It is also supported by the lecturers who think that by teaching this lesson in the university will develop their knowledge and skill in linguistics

O Discurso Direto e os Marcadores Conversacionais em Ambientes Forenses

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar o uso do discurso direto e dos marcadores conversacionais em ambientes forenses e suas funções interacionais nesse tipo de contexto. O aporte teórico desta pesquisa está fundamentado nos princípios da Análise da Conversação em relação de interface com a Linguística Forense, e o corpus é formado de excertos de quatro audiências judiciais públicas, transcritas conforme Preti (2003). Os resultados mostram que o discurso direto constitui uma estratégia eficaz para atribuir um efeito de realidade, objetividade e veracidade nas informações fornecidas pelos falantes. Os marcadores conversacionais são elementos multifuncionais, pois contribuem para a organização e estruturação do texto falado, além de possuírem as funções de resumidores, de busca de aprovação discursiva, de planejamento verbal e de atenuadores.

Interpreting meaning in police interviews: Applied Language Typology in a Forensic Linguistics context

The main aim of this paper is to raise awareness about the importance of language contrasts in legal interpreting contexts. The semantic typology of motion events put forward by Talmy (1991, 2000) and its implications for discourse and narrative (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004, 2005) are used as an example of how an applied typology approach can be useful for the analysis of language contrasts in a forensic linguistics context. Applied Language Typology (Filipović 2008, 2017a, b) is used here to analyse transcriptions of police interviews that were mediated by an English-Spanish interpreter in California (USA) and an English-Portuguese interpreter in Norfolk (UK). The results of this analysis demonstrate that certain differences in semantic components of motion such as Manner, Cause and Deixis can lead interpreters to add, omit or modify the content of a message in the process of translation. This leads us to conclude that professional practices such as the production of bilingual transcripts and use of control interpreters, together with the inclusion of Applied Language Typology in interpreting training, would improve the quality of interpreting practices in legal contexts.

Network motifs for translator stylometry identification.

Despite the extensive literature investigating stylometry analysis in authorship attribution research, translator stylometry is an understudied research area. The identification of translator stylometry contributes to many fields including education, intellectual property rights and forensic linguistics. In a two stage process, this paper first evaluates the use of existing lexical measures for the translator stylometry problem. Similar to previous research we found that using vocabulary richness in its traditional form as it has been used in the literature could not identify translator stylometry. This encouraged us to design an approach with the aim of identifying the distinctive patterns of a translator by employing network-motifs. Networks motifs are small sub-graphs which aim at capturing the local structure of a complex network. The proposed approach achieved an average accuracy of 83% in three-way classification. These results demonstrate that classic tools based on lexical features can be used for identifying translator stylometry if they get augmented with appropriate non-parametric scaling. Moreover, the use of complex network analysis and network motifs mining provided made it possible to design features that can solve translator stylometry analysis problems.

Forensic Linguistics Abroad: Establishment of the Subject

The article deals with the development of forensic linguistics as an interdisciplinary sphere of scientific research abroad. The article dwells on various approaches to the definition of the subject of the given research area (any text regarded in the legal context can be an object of research of forensic linguistics; presentation of forensic linguistics as a branch of applied linguistics in which linguistic theories and methodological approaches are used to solve legal problems; synthesis of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis making it clear who speaks, who is spoken to, when, where and with what purpose something is said). The author defines the chronological frames of the development of the discipline: the first works in the given area refer to the early 1960s; the word combination “forensic linguistics” was first used in 1968. The foreign forensic linguistics was first formed as judicial linguistics, therefore the term forensic linguistics is usually translated into Russian depending on the context as “lingvisticheskaya ekspertiza” (linguistic expertise) or as “sudebnaya lingvistika” (judicial linguistics). The article dwells on significant criminal cases and trials which demonstrated the need for forensic linguistics as an independent sphere of theoretical and applied research and showed the importance of design and development of forensic linguistic methodology: the judicial error of 1949 that lead to the execution of T. Evans and brought up the problem of determination of the credibility of evidence in court; trials on trademarks, for example the claim of the owners of the multinational fast food restaurant chain “McDonalds” against the “Quality Inns International” corporation which announced opening an economy class hotel chain under the name “McSleep”. Special attention is paid to the specificity of formation of forensic linguistics in the USA, Great Britain, Australia, Germany and Austria.

A Student Mock Trial in Forensic Linguistics

We review our preparation and production of a mock trial designed to give students experience as expert witnesses in forensic linguistics. As part of a senior seminar in Spanish linguistics, students made all pre-trial preparations and presented testimony for a real-world case related to the meaning of the Spanishlanguage nickname negrito. The trial took place in the Model Courtroom of The National Judicial College on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno. The courtroom setting included judge, counsel for the plaintiff and defense, bailiff, a court-certified Spanish-English interpreter, eight student expert-witnesses, and numerous student and faculty observers. This paper is structured to present four aspects of the trial: the instant case; pretrial preparation of all linguistic issues; testimony presented; and student perspectives on the experience of testifying and subsequently presenting this project at a linguistics conference.