Rui Sousa-Silva

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at University of Porto

As part of the Open Language Data Initiative shared tasks, we have expanded the FLORES+ evaluation set to include Emakhuwa, a low-resource language widely spoken in Mozambique. We translated the dev and devtest sets from Portuguese into Emakhuwa, and we detail the translation process and quality assurance measures used. Our methodology involved var...

Hate speech, which has been researched widely and transdisciplinarily, has attracted little attention in the field of linguistics, although it is mostly expressed linguistically. This research gap is even more noticeable in cases of cyber hate speech, where cybercriminal offences take linguistic form, thus requiring specific deterrence measures. Th...

Technology has long been used for criminal purposes, but the technological developments of the last decades have allowed users to remain anonymous online, which in turn increased the volume and heterogeneity of cybercrimes and made it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect and fight them. However, as they ignore the very nature of la...

In 1954, the former Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas took his own life with a shot to the heart. Vargas left two suicide notes, which are not fully consistent: a typed one, known as “Carta-Testamento” (stating his last will), was found next to his body; a second one, shorter and handwritten, was found later by his family among his belongings. The...

Cybercrime has increased significantly, recently, as a result of both individual and group criminal practice, and is now a threat to individuals, organisations, and democratic systems worldwide. However, cybercrime raises two main challenges for legal systems: firstly, because cybercriminals operate online, cybercrime spans beyond the boundaries of...

A análise de autoria forense consiste em determinar quem escreveu um ou mais textos questionados ou anónimos através da análise linguística desse(s) texto(s) partindo da premissa de que, enquanto falantes, temos um jeito muito peculiar de usar a nossa língua, ou seja, o nosso idioleto (Sapir, 1927, 1939; Coulthard, 2004; Mateus & Cardeira, 2007; So...

The study of argumentation is transversal to several research domains, from philosophy to linguistics, from the law to computer science and artificial intelligence. In discourse analysis, several distinct models have been proposed to harness argumentation, each with a different focus or aim. To analyze the use of argumentation in natural language,...

Interest in argument mining has resulted in an increasing number of argument annotated corpora. However, most focus on English texts with explicit argumentative discourse markers, such as persuasive essays or legal documents. Conversely, we report on the first extensive and consolidated Portuguese argument annotation project focused on opinion arti...

Annotating a corpus with argument structures is a complex task, and it is even more challenging when addressing text genres where argumentative discourse markers do not abound. We explore a corpus of opinion articles annotated by multiple annotators, providing diverse perspectives of the argumentative content therein. New annotation aggregation met...

Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the str...

The linguistic expression of subjectivity is a complex phenomenon that has been the object of reflection by several sub-areas of Linguistics and, more recently, of Computational Linguistics. Linguistic subjectivity, in terms of the linguistic expression of the speaker's opinions and attitudes, affects all levels of discourse organization and is pre...

Fake news is news-like content that has been produced without following journalism principles. Fake news try to mimic the look and feel of real news to intentionally disinform the reader. This phenomenon can have a strong influence on society, thus being potentially a severe problem. To address this phenomenon, systems to detect fake news have been...

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics offers a comprehensive survey of the subdiscipline of Forensic Linguistics, with this new edition providing both updated overviews from leading figures in the field and exciting new contributions from the next generation of forensic linguists. The Handbook is a unique work of reference to the leading...

Scientific integrity and misconduct in general, and plagiarism in particular have attracted general attention worldwide in recent years, especially as a result of high-profile cases involving politicians and famous journalists. The perception that plagiarism is a widespread phenomenon, especially in academic contexts, led to the development of plag...

The proceedings explore knowledge organization systems and their role in knowledge organization, knowledge sharing, and information searching. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to knowledge transfer, representation, concepts and conceptualization, social tagging, domain analysis, music classification, fiction genres, museum organizati...

The Portuguese Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality advocates that equality between men and women is a fundamental principle of the Portuguese Constitution. While court decisions should reflect this principle, a preliminary analysis in cases of gender violence reveals that this is not always the case. Based on the extensive literature on...

Rui Sousa-Silva é professor auxiliar da Faculdade de Letras e investigador do Centro de Linguística (CLUP) da Universidade do Porto, onde desenvolve atualmente a sua investigação em Linguística Forense e Cibercrime. É licenciado em Tradução e mestre em Tradução e Terminologia pela Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (FLUP) e doutor em Ling...

A considerably high volume of research into plagiarism has been conducted in recent years, most of which focused on educational approaches. Other studies, however, attempted to establish, especially from a forensic linguistic perspective, the extent to which linguistic analyses like the ones used in forensic contexts could help determine the degree...

The number of computational approaches to forensic linguistics has increased signiicantly over the last decades, as a result not only of increasing computer processing power, but also of the growing interest of computer scientists in natural language processing and in forensic applications. At the same time, forensic linguists faced the need to use...

In recent years, cases of academic and non-academic plagiarism, scientific integrity and misconduct have attracted general attention worldwide. Despite the recent technical and methodological developments in the field, detecting some instances of plagiarism (e.g. paraphrase- and translation-based plagiarism) and contract cheating remains a challeng...

Book review of R. Carter & A. Goddard (Eds.) (2016). 'How to Analyse Texts', London: Routledge.

Nasúltimasdécadas,oplágiotemsidoperspetivadocomoumproblema grave nas mais diversas esferas sociais e pro ssionais, da academia até à justiça, com consequências sérias. Importa, por isso, questionar o papel desempenhado pela linguística forense nestes casos. Este artigo começa por contextualizar a pro- blemática do plágio, em geral, e do plágio acad...

Plagiarism has traditionally been studied has an immoral, rather than an illegal act (Garner, 2009). This approach, however, has been challenged in recent years, not only by research into composition studies (e.g. Howard, 1995), but also by research into forensic linguistics and moreover by legal practice (Turell, 2008). In the forensic linguistics...

O plágio tem sido tradicionalmente classificado como um ato imoral e violador das normas éticas, mais do que uma ação ilegal (Garner 2009; Goldstein 2003), e o plágio jornalístico não é exceção. Como referem Coulthard & Johnson (2007), a reutilização de texto por jornalistas, sem atribuição ou com atribuição de autoria inadequada, não é normalmente...

In recent years, several cases of plagiarism attracted media attention worldwide, due to the high prole of the suspected plagiarists. The highest pro-le cases involved politicians, such as the German Defence Minister Guttenberg (2011), the Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta (2012), and the German Education Minister Schavan (2013). The two German...

Automatic plagiarism detection tools have evolved considerably in recent years. Owing in part to the recent technological developments, which provided more powerful processing capacities, as well as to the research interest that plagiarism detection attracted among computational linguists, results are nowadays more accurate and reliable. However, m...

Plagiarism detection methods have improved signicantly over the last decades, and as a result of the advanced research conducted by computational and mostly forensic linguists, simple and sophisticated textual borrowing strategies can now be identied more easily. In particular, simple text comparison algorithms developed by computational linguists...

Bethany K. Dumas (1937- ) is a prominent figure in current applied linguistics and, in particular, in forensic linguistics. Her long career and her wide-ranging research interests range from literature, qualitative and quantitative research methodology and discourse analysis to rhetoric, legal discourse, and language and the law. She has published...

WalkinshawIan, Learning politeness: Disagreement in a second language. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. Pp. 1, 297. Pb. $55.95. - Volume 40 Issue 5 - Rui Sousa-Silva

In this paper we propose a set of stylistic markers for automatically attributing authorship to micro-blogging messages. The proposed markers include highly personal and idiosyncratic editing options, such as ‘emoticons’, interjections, punctuation, abbreviations and other low-level features. We evaluate the ability of these features to help discri...

In this paper we compare the robustness of several types of stylistic markers to help discriminate authorship at sentence level. We train a SVM-based classifier using each set of features separately and perform sentence-level authorship analysis over corpus of editorials published in a Portuguese quality newspaper. Results show that features based...

The concept of plagiarism is not uncommonly associated with the concept of intellectual property, both for historical and legal reasons: the approach to the ownership of 'moral', non-material goods has evolved to the right to individual property, and consequently a need was raised to establish a legal framework to cope with the infringement of thos...