#authorship analysis

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Applying linguistics to real-world cases - profiling

Applying linguistics to real-world cases – profiling

My degree thesis was about the development of a Mathematical and Statistical Algorithm that is able to perform, or better to help perform, linguistic analysis on a text so as to discover, identify, and evidence bias in speech. The algorithm can be used both as a standalone tool or, as I use it daily, in conjunction with Artificial Intelligence tools to broaden its scope and at the same time…

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Forensic Linguistics in Court: The Tennessee Facebook Murders

In a 2012 case known as the Tennessee Facebook Murders, forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University analyzed the online correspondences of “Chris”, an alleged CIA agent encouraging the parents and family friend of Janelle Potter to take out a CIA-sanctioned hit, themselves, on a couple who had unfriended Potter on Facebook.

Authorship analysis demonstrated that Potter herself posed as “Chris” to convince her family and friend that she herself was under threat by the couple, eventually leading her father and the family friend to murder the couple in cold blood, with their infant left in the dead mother’s arms.

Potter, her parents, and the family friend were all convicted of varying counts of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and solicitation.

Find out more about the Tennessee Facebook Murders in the book “Too Pretty to Live” by Dennis Brooks, and on Investigation Discovery’s special of the same name.

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Forensic Linguistics in Court: The Coleman Murders

A St. Louis Post Dispatch article on the 2009 murder of the family of Chris Coleman details the work of forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University.

Dr. Leonard analyzed threat letters sent to Coleman’s family, as well as spray painted words left at the scene of the triple homicide. These writings were compared to Coleman’s, as well as the FBI’s Communicated Threat Assessment Database to demonstrate the Coleman himself was responsible to the threats to his wife and two children before they were murdered.

Based on this and other evidence, Chris Coleman was found guilty of all three murders.

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Forensic Linguistics in Literature: The J. K. Rowling Reveal

In this NPR interview, Larkin Page-Jacobs interviews Dr. Patric Juola, a computational forensic linguist from Duquesne University, on his outing J.K. Rowling as the woman behind the pen name Robert Galbraith, the author of ‘A Cuckoo’s Calling’. 

Dr. Juola used a computational approach to authorship analysis and attribution when asked by the Sunday Times (UK) to compare four suspected authors to the writings of Robert Galbraith, as detailed in the linked articles.

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Forensic Linguistics in Court: The Unabomber

Jim Fitzgerald, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, has worked on many cases that attracted national attention, including the JonBenét Ramsey case and the post 9/11 anthrax scare, as well as the Unabomber case, which he discusses with host Jerri Williams on FBI Retired Case File Review in the audio above.

For more about the Unabomber case and the role of forensic linguistics in catching Ted Kaszynski, check out the article, linked above, that accompanies the interview.

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Forensic Linguistics on TV: The Hummert Murder

Forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University on Investigation Discovery for the murder investigation of Charlene Hummert.

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Forensic Linguistics in the News: Kardashian/West on Twitter

Although pop culture does not generally fall within the purview of a forensic linguist—or indeed any forensic expert, we are sometimes asked by news outlets to render a professional opinion to an article under investigation.

That’s exactly what happened when The New York Daily News’ Confidenti@l looked into a 2016 incident with Kim Kardashian on Twitter, where her clapback to the likes of Piers Morgan and Bette Midler had fans and skeptics alike questioning whether the snappy tweets were written by Kim or Kanye—who is far more notorious for his Twitter quips.

The article linked above does a good job of explaining the results of the quick linguistic analysis, while the analysis itself is broken down below.

Of course, most forensic linguistic analyses, even when they deal with social media platforms such as Twitter, use features that exist at higher and deeper levels of language. But given the time crunch and interesting but otherwise largely inconsequential nature of the article, such analyses offer an interesting look into forensic linguistic for the lay reader.