Overview

Implementing a novel method for identifying idiolectal co-selections and taking the UNABOM investigation as a case study, this book evaluates the effectiveness and reliability of using the web for forensic purposes, since forensic linguists often use the web as a tool in forensic authorship analysis cases. A notable example includes the American trial of the Unabomber, in which the web was searched for idiolectal co-selections, and claims made about their distinctiveness based on the number of search results. In order to assess whether the web can reliably be used in this way, two experiments are described in which the web is used to attribute documents to their authors, both when texts produced by candidate authors are, and are not, available for comparison. With considerable unreliability in the results both between different search engines and over time this book argues that more caution is required in using the web as a corpus for forensic purposes.

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9781322217277

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