Adaptation and Adaptability in Corpus Linguistics

Linguistics and English Language, School of Social Sciences, Lancaster University (Full-time, indefinite post) Linguistics and English Language within the School of Social Sciences at Lancaster Univer...

Sync Zotero attachments with a reMarkable tablet over USB - fbkarsdorp/zotero-remarkable

Our lab presented five papers at the last European conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics in June in Montpellier. Here are some pictures as well as links to see the abstracts and slides of the talks:

In our latest research, led by Sadie Barlow and with Dr Edoardo Manino, we discovered a very important property of LambdaG: it does not require a calibration dataset to produce well calibrated likelihood ratios. A simple correction is sufficient. This means that the analysis is significantly simpler to implement and explain. LambdaG is therefore also the only existing authorship verification method that does not require a calibration analysis to produce likelihood ratios. The paper, currently under review, is available on arXiv here:

Bootstrap Distance Imposters, a stylometric method - bnagy/bdi

Dr Chris Montgomery says the team is

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Grammar as a behavioral biometric: using cognitively motivated grammar models for authorship verification

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications - Grammar as a behavioral biometric: using cognitively motivated grammar models for authorship verification

I'm pleased to announce the pre-print of a new article on LLM impersonation, with Baoyi Zeng as first author. The paper shows that current state-of-the-art authorship verification methods tend not to be fooled by an LLM trying to impersonate someone simply using prompting. Several high profile forensic linguistic cases involved the perpetrator manually trying to impersonate someone, such as the victim.

My R package for forensic authorship analysis, 'idiolect', now has an associated paper published in the Journal of Open Source Software. You can read it here (and use it to cite the package): The paper has been released with the new version of idiolect, 1.2.0.

PhD Project - Artificial Weather: Mining the Language and Visual Culture of Weather and Climate Modification (CreativeAI Studentship) at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com

As of August 1, 2026, the Department of Languages and Literatures of the University of Basel (English division, Prof. Miriam Locher) is seeking to fill a 60% PhD position in English linguistics. The p...

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YouTube video by Runporto

My latest paper with Hugo Bowles and Claire Wood examines a Dickens mystery: did he author the recently decoded story “The Two Brothers”? The answer is complicated. The paper showcases our new method, LambdaG (forthcoming!). The paper can be found here or the free accepted version is here.

The Routledge Handbook of Ethics in Forensic Linguistics is the first comprehensive reference work to explore the ethical dimensions of forensic language analysis across a range of applied and academi...

"Jingle Bells" and "Good King Wenceslas" haven't sounded like this in a long time.

Metaphor is a pervasive feature of discourse and a powerful lens for examining cognition, emotion, and ideology. Large-scale analysis, however, has been constrained by the need for manual annotation d...

Conference on Natural Language Processing

Speech and Language Processing

Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic E...

Abstract Garnering public engagement with academic research in a timely and accessible manner has become a central concern in contemporary academia. This centrality has given rise to a growing interes...

On Monday Dr James Tompkinson (University of York) and I presented our talk on "Assessing the suitability of forensic authorship analysis methodologies for speech data" at the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) 2025 conference at Leiden University (The Hague), where we show some preliminary results about applying some authorship analysis techniques to transcribed speech. You can find the slides of the talk here:

On Monday I delivered a talk at the Comparative Literature Goes Digital Workshop at the Digital Humanities 2025 conference. As part of this talk I have also prepared a tutorial to use our new authorship verification method, LambdaG, to produce text heatmaps to study the idiosyncratic language of an author. This Github repository contains the abstract, a link to the tutorial and the slide of my talk:

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the ‘Writings Wrongs’ podcast. The episode covered the events of the Aiya Napa rape case and the evidence I presented at the trial. Like all other episodes, the hosts do an amazing job explaining everything in detail but in a really accessible way. I highly recommend this episode, as well as the whole podcast! You can find it here:

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders worldwide and may affect an individual’s ability to perform essential life activities. Still, “less than 25 % of individuals with depression recei...

The slides and abstract of our talk "A corpus analysis of idiolectal n-grams" at #CL2025 are now available here:

Presentation slides and reproduction materials for CL 2025 presentation “Finding structure in multivariate data” Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies