The Morbid Linguist

It's clear that AI is actively changing our lives. I venture to suggest that AI will also have an impact on criminal behavior, if it hasn't already. By that, I mean that I expect to some day read a ransom note, threatening letter, or manifesto written at least in part by AI. So I believe the future of forensic linguistics must be a matter of detecting language written by AI models. AI and its writings have already appeared in civil cases. Just last summer, someone used ChatGPT to write a court filing , for one example. I am confident that I can expand my thesis — a method of determining an author's native language — to apply it to detecting AI-writing in a text sample. The big obstacle that has discouraged me from trying so far has been the lack of access to academic research catalogs since I graduated a few years ago. There are other libraries I can use, namely ResearchGate , so I'll start my search there to see if anyone has published anything about authorship analysi...

The Nursery Note One of the most famous kidnapping cases in American history is that of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The child’s father and namesake was Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. Lindbergh, Sr. had completed his record-breaking transatlantic flight in 1927, and he was still a prominent celebrity when his 20-month-old son was kidnapped from his nursery on the night of March 1, 1932. The infant was not recovered until May 12, 1932, when his body was discovered near the Lindbergh home. Investigators determined that he likely died shortly after he was taken.  Between the night of March 1 and when ransom is delivered on April 2, 1932, the abductors delivered a total of 15 notes . In September 1934, a German immigrant was seen spending one of the gold certificates used to pay the ransom and was soon arrested. He was convicted and executed in 1936.  Mark Falzini , the archivist of the New Jersey State Police Museum in possession of the notes and other evidence, i...

In my thesis, I hypothesize that forensic linguistic techniques of linguistic demographic profiling can be honed into a method of native language analysis that is supported by quantified language transference data. My previous post explains how I set out to develop Native Language Analysis (NLA) as just such a method, and I strongly suggest you read it first. To summarize, I am essentially expanding on the established techniques of author profiling by incorporating quantified language data to connect interlanguage transference features to the native languages that likely inspired them. As promised, this post is based on the sections of my thesis where I test my hypothetical method by using it to analyze the language evidence from real forensic linguistic cases. One of the languages I catalogued data for was Arabic. The evidence I analyzed comes from the case of Daniel Pearl's abduction. Text of Email 1 Daniel Pearl was a journalist for The Wall Street Journal on assignment...

I wrote and published a post on Linkedin that is almost identical to this one. As a recent graduate, I am looking for work. Currently, the most appropriate market for my skills is in legal work. Unfortunately, not a lot of recruiters or even lawyers are aware of forensic linguistics or what it can achieve in civil legal work. So, in this post, I explain one way in which forensic linguists can be an advantageous addition to a law firm: legal writing. Forensic linguistics is the scientific study of language wherever it intersects with the law. The term "forensic" may inspire the assumption that the field is strictly about criminal justice or investigation; however, the term "forensic" simply means "of the forum," such as the forum of a courtroom. While it is true that forensic linguists are trained in analyzing language evidence using techniques such as authorship analysis, demographic profiling, appraisal analysis, corpus analysis, and more, the investiga...

One of the first things I learned in studying Forensic Linguistics is that I should never say I have "identified" the author or speaker of my language evidence. That advice comes from  a scientist who has investigated several murders . As Dr. Leonard explains it: Even if you have enough evidence to implicate a single suspect, there's still a chance that among the seven billion humans in the world, one of them might happen to use language in the exact same way as your suspect. There's no room for that "scientific certainty" bullshit in his department. The goal of Forensic Linguistic investigation, rather, is to determine the probable creator(s) of language evidence. As an investigator, I would only say, based on the language examined, which suspect(s) I might interpret to be its most likely creator. Maybe even least likely creator, if it's an Authorship Attribution case. All of this hedging - avoidance of certainty or commitment - is intentional. I...