Forensic Linguistics

Ritwik Banerjee | Principal Investigator
Yejin Choi | Professor of Computer Science and Human-Centered AI, Stanford University
Song Feng | Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Web Services
Chaoyuan Zuo | Doctoral Researcher  →  Lecturer (tenure-track), School of Journalism & Communication, Nankai University
Yu Zhao | M.S. Researcher

Every individual has certain ways of language use that are unique to them (very much like fingerprints). Such a unique use of grammar and other language features is known as a person’s idoiolect, which can be used for accurate identification of a text’s author — an important aspect of forensic linguistics. In this line of research, we investigate authorship attribution of various documents, including highly formal technical writings [Feng et al. 2012] and collaborative multi-author documents [Zuo et al. 2019]. We also analyze the process of typing, investigating keystroke dynamics as a behavioral signal for deception detection and drawing an analogy between typing patterns and prosody in speech [Banerjee et al. 2014].

Note: The project is not our current focus. It sees sporadic progress when there are students interested in pursuing this topic.

Publications

Feng, S., Banerjee, R., and Choi, Y. 2012. Characterizing Stylistic Elements in Syntactic Structure. Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1522–1533.     

Zuo, C., Zhao, Y., and Banerjee, R. 2019. Style Change Detection with Feed-forward Neural Networks. CLEF 2019 Working Notes. Working Notes of CLEF 2019 - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, CEUR-WS.org.     

Banerjee, R., Feng, S., Kang, J.S., and Choi, Y. 2014. Keystroke Patterns as Prosody in Digital Writings: A Case Study with Deceptive Reviews and Essays. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, 1469–1473.     

This project page is hosted and maintained by the principal investigator, Dr. Ritwik Banerjee.