https://lesli-journal.library.pitt.edu/ojs/lesli <p>Who wrote it? Who said it? Is this text similar to that one? Can we group those texts together? Is this text really what it purports to be? What can we know about the kind of person who generated this text --age, dialect, native language?</p><p>These are the kinds of questions that can turn an investigation around, and each one relies on language as evidence. Linguistic evidence can and has already played a crucial role in homeland security, counter-terrorism, criminal and civil investigations, national intelligence, business intelligence and executive protection.</p><p>LESLI is an interdisciplinary journal for linguists, computer scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, attorneys, law enforcement, security executives, and intelligence analysts. As the journal of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and its membership TALE: The Association for Linguistic Evidence, LESLI provides a forum to present rigorous research, requests for research, and policy discussions.</p><p><strong>READERS</strong></p><p>Use the <a href="/ojs/index.php/lesli/user/register">Register</a> link at the top of this page. As a registered reader, you will receive the Table of Contents by email for each new issue of the journal. See the journal's <a href="/ojs/index.php/lesli/about/submissions#privacyStatement">Privacy Statement</a>, so you that know that your name and email address will not be used for other purposes. Thank you in advance for registering as registration allows the journal to keep track of your support and total readership.</p><p><strong>AUTHORS</strong></p><p>Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the <a href="/ojs/index.php/lesli/about">About the Journal</a> page for the journal's section policies, as well as the <a href="http://lesli-journal.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/lesli/about/submissions#authorGuidelines">Author Guidelines</a>. Authors need to <a href="/ojs/index.php/lesli/user/register">register</a> with the journal prior to submitting.</p><p>When you register, be sure that you check Author role (Reader is checked by default). If you do not have Author checked you will not be able to submit a manuscript online. If you have already registered, and you cannot find a place to submit, then go to your profile and make sure that the Author role is checked.</p><p>If you have already registered and your profile includes the Author role, you can can simply <a href="/ojs/index.php/index/login">log in</a> and begin the five-step submission process.</p><p><strong>LIBRARIANS AND CYBRARIANS</strong></p><p>Thank you in advance for listing this journal among your library's electronic journal holdings. We highly recommend the University of Pittsburgh ULS as our online publisher. LESLI's open source publishing system is suitable for libraries to host for your faculty and corporate members to use with journals they are involved in editing (see <a href="http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs">Open Journal Systems</a>).</p> e-journals@mail.pitt.edu en-US Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence 2327-5596 <ul><li>The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License</a>or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:<ol type="a"><li>Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;</li></ol>with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.</li><li>The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a pre-publication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html">The Effect of Open Access</a>). Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.</li><li>Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.</li><li>The Author represents and warrants that:<ol type="a"><li>the Work is the Author’s original work;</li><li>the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;</li><li>the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;</li><li>the Work has not previously been published;</li><li>the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and</li><li>the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.</li></ol></li><li>The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 7 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.</li></ul> https://lesli-journal.library.pitt.edu/ojs/lesli/article/view/19 In this paper, the methods for developing a database of Spanish writing that can be used for forensic linguistic research are presented, including our data collection procedures. Specifically, the main instrument used for data collection has been translated into Spanish and adapted from Chaski (2001). It consists of ten tasks, by means of which the subjects are asked to write formal and informal texts about different topics. To date, 93 undergraduates from Spanish universities have already participated in the study and prisoners convicted of gender-based abuse have participated. A twofold analysis has been performed, since the data collected have been approached from a semantic and a morphosyntactic perspective. Regarding the semantic analysis, psycholinguistic categories have been used, many of them taken from the LIWC dictionary (Pennebaker et al., 2001). In order to obtain a more comprehensive depiction of the linguistic data, some other ad-hoc categories have been created, based on the corpus itself, using a double-check method for their validation so as to ensure inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, as regards morphosyntactic analysis, the natural language processing tool ALIAS TATTLER is being developed for Spanish. Results shows that is it possible to differentiate non-abusers from abusers with strong accuracy based on linguistic features. Ángela Almela Gema Alcaraz-Mármol Arancha García-Pinar Clara Pallejá Copyright (c) 2019 Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence 2019-09-13 2019-09-13 3 10.5195/lesli.2019.19 https://lesli-journal.library.pitt.edu/ojs/lesli/article/view/20 This paper demonstrates how an author recognition system could be benchmarked, as a prerequisite for admission in court. The system used in the demonstration is the FEDERALES system, and the experimental data used were taken from the British National Corpus. The system was given several tasks, namely attributing a text sample to a specific text, verifying that a text sample was taken from a specific text, and verifying that a text sample was produced by a specific author. For the former two tasks, 1,099 texts with at least 10,000 words were used; for the latter 1,366 texts with known authors, which were verified against models for the 28 known authors for whom there were three or more texts. The experimental tasks were performed with different sampling methods (sequential samples or samples of concatenated random sentences), different sample sizes (1,000, 500, 250 or 125 words), varying amounts of training material (between 2 and 20 samples) and varying amounts of test material (1 or 3 samples). Under the best conditions, the system performed very well: with 7 training and 3 test samples of 1,000 words of randomly selected sentences, text attribution had an equal error rate of 0.06% and text verification an equal error rate of 1.3%; with 20 training and 3 test samples of 1,000 words of randomly selected sentences, author verification had an equal error rate of 7.5%. Under the worst conditions, with 2 training and 1 test sample of 125 words of sequential text, equal error rates for text attribution and text verification were 26.6% and 42.2%, and author verification did not perform better than chance. Furthermore, the quality degradation curves with slowly worsening conditions were not smooth, but contained steep drops. All in all, the results show the importance of having a benchmark which is as similar as possible to the actual court material for which the system is to be used, since the measured system quality differed greatly between evaluation scenarios and system degradation could not be predicted easily on the basis of the chosen scenario parameters. Hans van Halteren Copyright (c) 2019 Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence 2019-09-13 2019-09-13 3 10.5195/lesli.2019.20