Tim Grant

• Aston University

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an important part of our everyday lives, yet user requirements for designing AI-assisted systems in law enforcement remain unclear. To address this gap, we conducted qualitative research on decision-making within a law enforcement agency. Our study aimed to identify limitations of existing practices, explore...

This paper sets the stage for our primary objective, which is to identify and examine various forms of claimed expertise in anonymous online interactions. By building upon the findings and incorporating the proposed enhancements, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and implications of different expertise claims within the context of...

The purpose of this paper is to provide both a theoretical foundation and apractical framework for analysing power and authority in online interactions.This is to assist forensic linguists and law enforcement in their understandingof anonymous online criminal networks, and the roles of individuals in theseonline communities. The lack of contextual...

This Element examines progress in research and practice in forensic authorship analysis. It describes the existing research base and examines what makes an authorship analysis more or less reliable. Further to this, the author describes the recent history of forensic science and the scientific revolution brought about by the invention of DNA eviden...

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) is a permanent,controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data. We broadlyunderstand forensic linguistics as any academic research with a potential toimprove the delivery of justice through the analysis of language. FoLD thuscomprises a wide range of datasets with relevance to forensic...

IN PRESS FOR CORPORA (17.2, 2022) The paper presents a two-part forensic linguistic analysis of an historic collection of abuse letters, sent to individuals in the public eye and individuals' private homes between 2007-2009. We employ the technique of structural topic modelling (STM) to identify distinctions in the core topics of the letters, gau...

In this chapter we seek to elucidate the potential of linguistic analysis in the undercover pursuit of criminals online. We examine the relationship between language and online identity performance and address the question of what linguistic analysis is necessary and sufficient to describe an online linguistic persona to the extent it could be succ...

Cambridge Core - Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics - Language and Online Identities - by Tim Grant

Intent is a psychological quality that threat assessors view as a required step on a threatener’s pathway to action. Recognizing the presence of intent in threatening language is therefore crucial to determining whether a threat is credible. Nevertheless, a ‘lack of empirical guidance’ (p. 326) is available concerning how violent intent is expresse...

The majority of practicing forensic linguists working on questions of authorship subscribe in some form to a theory of linguistic identity that relies on a view of language as essentially a product of sociolinguistic experiences and membership of particular identity categories. On the other hand, discourse analysts tend to adopt a social interactio...

This article demonstrates and examines the potential use of interlingual identifiers for forensic authorship analysis and native language influence detection (NLID). The work focuses on the practical applications of native language (L1) identifiers by a human analyst in investigative situations. Using naturally occurring blog posts where the writer...

This article provides a case study of deceptive online identity performance by a convicted child sex offender. Most prior linguistic and psychological research into online sexual abuse analyses transcripts involving adult decoys posing as children. In contrast, our data comprise genuine online conversations between 15 the offender and 20 victims. U...

Studies by Chiang and Grant (2017, 2018) on the rhetorical moves of online child sexual abusers suggest that interactions between ooenders and adults posing as children diier in various ways from those between ooenders and genuine child victims. They point speciically to the use by one ooender of moves identiied as Overt persuasion and Extortion in...

The aim of the present study was to (a) assess the reliability with which indecent images of children (IIOC) are classified as being of an indecent versus nonindecent nature, and (b) examine in detail the decision-making process engaged in by law enforcement personnel who undertake the difficult task of identifying and classifying IIOC as per the c...

I describe and discuss a series of court cases that focus upon on decoding the meaning of slang terms. Examples include sexual slang used in a description by a child and an Internet Relay Chat containing a conspiracy to murder. I consider the task presented by these cases for the forensic linguist and the roles the linguist may assume in determinin...

One way in which linguists have been able to o er their expertise to undercover online policing in England and Wales is assisting police o cers in the assumption of alternative identities in order to apprehend o enders in the context of the online sexual abuse and grooming of children. With reference to the historical Instant Messaging (IM) logs of...

Using transcripts of chatroom grooming interactions, this paper explores and evaluates the usefulness of Swales' (1981) move analysis framework in contributing to the current understanding of online grooming processes. The framework is applied to seven transcripts of grooming interactions taken from perverted-justice.com. The paper presents 14 iden...

One limitation widely noted in sociolinguistics is the tension presented by the ‘observer׳s paradox’ (Labov, 1972), i.e. the notion that everyday language is susceptible to contamination by observation (Stubbs, 1983: 224). The observer׳s paradox has been perceived to present significant challenges to traditional sociolinguistic researchers seeking...

This article uses a research project into the online conversations of sex offenders and the children they abuse to further the arguments for the acceptability of experimental work as a research tool for linguists. The research reported here contributes to the growing body of work within linguistics that has found experimental methods to be useful i...

Memory is central to investigative interviews with witnesses and suspects, yet decades of research have shown that remembering is subject to constructive and reconstructive processes that can adversely impact the reliability of accounts that are elicited at interview. In this chapter we first outline research concerning our memory for events (?epis...

This chapter reviews the important areas that psychology, linguistics and law enforcement have impacted upon in terms of rigorous and collaborative scientific endeavours. Important areas that will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners for research relating to communication in forensic contexts are discussed in detail, including vulne...

Communication in investigative and legal settings is a vitally important area of practice and research. This chapter outlines the significant paradigm shift in interviewing practices, highlighting various studies that have been conducted that have demarked this change. We examine the role of linguistics in this paradigm shift and the importance of...

There is a proliferation of categorization schemes in the scientific literature that have mostly been developed from psychologists’ understanding of the nature of linguistic interactions. This has a led to problems in defining question types used by interviewers. Based on the principle that the overarching purpose of an interview is to elicit infor...

In the present state of the art of authorship attribution there seems to be an opposition between two approaches: cognitive and stylistic methodologies. It is proposed in this article that these two approaches are complementary and that the apparent gap between them can be bridged using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and in particular some o...

This article examines to what extent police investigators can reliably question a vulnerable suspect’s account when the evidence base for appropriate questioning styles for this particular vulnerable group is limited. We examine a simulated interview to demonstrate how difficult it is to challenge discrepancies in a vulnerable suspect’s account. It...

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...

The past two decades has seen a plethora of papers and academic research conducted on investigative interviews with victims, witnesses and suspected offenders, with a particular focus on questioning techniques and typologies. However, despite this research, there still remain significant discrepancies amongst academic researchers and practitioners...

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...

Current debate within forensic authorship analysis has tended to polarise those who argue that analysis methods should reflect a strong cognitive theory of idiolect and others who see less of a need to look behind the stylistic variation of the texts they are examining. This chapter examines theories of idiolect and asks how useful or necessary the...

Substance use has an effect on an individual's propensity to commit acquisitive crime with recent studies showing substance users more likely to leave forensic material at a crime scene. An examination of acquisitive crime solved in Northamptonshire, U.K., during 2006 enabled 70 crime scene behavior characteristics to be analyzed for substance and...

The purpose of the present study is to test the case linkage principles of behavioural consistency and behavioural distinctiveness using serial vehicle theft data. Data from 386 solved vehicle thefts committed by 193 offenders were analysed using Jaccard's, regression and Receiver Operating Characteristic analyses to determine whether objectively o...

This chapter demonstrates diversity in the activity of authorship and the corresponding diversity of forensic authorship analysis questions and techniques. Authorship is discussed in terms of Love’s (2002) multifunctional description of precursory, executive, declarative and revisionary authorship activities and the implications of this distinction...

Police records of 38 rape allegations, evenly split into maintained-as-true and withdrawn-as-false categories were compared with 19 generated-false statements from recruited participants. The Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (IRMAS) was used to assess the attitudes of the participants and a content analysis derived from IRMAS was used to compare...

Very little empirical work exists on cyberstalking. The current study analysed detailed questionnaires completed by 1051 self-defined stalking victims. Almost half (47.5%) reported harassment via the Internet, but only 7.2% of the sample was judged to have been cyberstalked. Ordinal regression analyses of four groups of victims, categorized accordi...

The judicial interest in ‘scientific’ evidence has driven recent work to quantify results for forensic linguistic authorship analysis. Through a methodological discussion and a worked example this paper examines the issues which complicate attempts to quantify results in work. The solution suggested to some of the difficulties is a sampling and tes...

Jaccard has been the choice similarity metric in ecology and forensic psychology for comparison of sites or offences, by species or behaviour. This paper applies a more powerful hierarchical measure - taxonomic similarity (s), recently developed in marine ecology - to the task of behaviourally linking serial crime. Forensic case linkage attempts to...

This research paper presents an examination of the journey to and from crime for autotheft offenders in the UK. For 852 offences, ‘wheel’ distances are calculated for triangles formed by offenders’ home location, theft location, and vehicle disposal location. The study demonstrates typical isosceles mobility triangles; distances travelled to and fr...

Understanding factors that affect the severity of a juvenile-stranger sexual assault has implications for crime prevention, and potentially, the assessment and treatment of juvenile sex offenders. This study investigated how victim characteristics and the number of suspects affected the use of physical violence and weapons and the occurrence of pen...

Investigative linguistics, that branch of forensic linguistics which assists investigation, has tended to concentrate on authorship analysis of written texts (see Grant and Baker, 2001; McMenamin, 2002), speaker identification (Rose, 2002; Yarney, 2001) and disputes of meaning and use (Shuy, 1993, 1998). The first two of these presume that there ar...

The most frequent general criticism I receive is, I think, upon the style,—’if I would but change my style’! But that is an objection (isn’t it?) to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere writer must feel, that ‘Le style c’est l’homme’; a fact, however, scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics.Shepherd and Mortime...

Case linkage, the linking of crimes into series, is used in policing in the UK and other countries. Previous researchers have proposed using rapists’ speech in this practice; however, researching this application requires the development of a reliable coding system for rapists’ speech. A system was developed based on linguistic theories of pragmati...

The introduction of women officers into HM Prison Service raised questions regarding women's ability to perform what had traditionally been a male role. Existing research is inconclusive as to whether female prison officers are as competent as male prison officers, and whether there are gender differences in job performance. This study examined pri...

Research into social facilitation effects reveals three factors affecting response performance: types of task, types of audience and type of actor. This study attempts to establish a minimal baseline for task and audience type in order to examine difference between personality types in the actors. Results indicate that performance in both extravert...

In response to Chaski’s article (published in this volume) an examination is made of the methodological understanding necessary to identify dependable markers for forensic (and general) authorship attribution work. This examination concentrates on three methodological areas of concern which researchers intending to identify markers of authorship mu...

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...