Thursday, May 6, 2021

ALIAS and Linguistic Forensics

I had the pleasure of chatting for a few hours with Carole Chaski, the CEO and President of ALIAS Technology LLC, which she founded in 2007. She provided a demo of her software, ALIAS, which utilizes forensic linguistics to aid in investigations. While the need for forensic linguistics may not be common in investigations, it is something you should be aware of, in case you ever need such a tool.

Learn more about ALIAS at this link.

Below is information from brochures she sent to me:

"ALIAS has specific functions, validated for the forensic investigative setting, to analyze:

• Threatening communications

• Suicide notes (phony and real)

• Predatory chats

• Emails that reveal trade secret or classified information

• Hate mail or other embarrassing disclosures

• Blog posts, social media posts, tweets, txt messages

• Witness statements

• Legal rulings, briefs, motions"

"Our consulting services generally focus on the following issues in forensic linguistic evidence:

• IDENTIFICATION: Who wrote it? Who's at the keyboard? What’s the language(s)?

• TEXT TYPING: Is this document what it seems to be? A real suicide note? A real threat? A predatory chat? Truthful or deceptive?

• TEXT SIMILARITY: Are these documents related? Do these documents connect screennames? Are these documents too close to be independent?

• LINGUISTIC PROFILING: What does the language reveal about the author's demographics (native language, native dialect, educational level, gender, age, capacity in non-native language)?

• PEER REVIEW AND REBUTTAL: is the report using standard linguistics or not? Is the analysis conducted properly or missing crucial steps? Does the proposed analysis work empirically? Has it been tested and validated independent of any litigation? Our peer review and rebuttal reports have successfully blocked or severely restricted junk science and pseudolinguistics from being admitted, in numerous cases."

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