Abstract:

The certificate in Forensic Linguistics is offered by the Department of English Studies at Graz University. The aim of this newly developed educational teaching program is to enable students to gain in-depth knowledge of research that can be applied practically in legal contexts. Students will learn to communicate more efficiently in legal contexts such as police interviews and courtroom settings. On top of methods for textual analysis, students are introduced to forensic phonetics which aids speaker identification and profiling. By developing these analytical skills, we hope to prepare students for future careers in legal spheres.

The teaching objectives of this certificate are informed by recent research data such as the interdisciplinary and funded TXT – Language as a Trace project. The project will be addressed in several teaching sessions. It seeks to develop an AI-based analytical tool capable of assessing whether a given text is suitable for in-depth expert examination. Additionally, the tool will provide an initial estimate of whether comparable linguistic traces already exist within a reference database, thereby indicating cases that may warrant more detailed comparative analysis. It draws on the handwritten CV collection of the Document & Handwriting Investigation Unit within the Department of Forensic Science of the Criminal Intelligence Service Austria (Bundeskriminalamt) at the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), which will be digitized and expanded with additional incriminated texts. Methodologically, the project employs machine learning techniques to enable the AI-based tool to deliver time-efficient assessments regarding both the feasibility of linguistic analysis and the potential relevance of comparison texts for expert follow-up.

The results of the project will be used to inform language teaching in the certificate for the analysis of cases involving stalking, blackmail, hate speech, or defamation or anonymous communications such as ransom notes, confession letters, or manifestos. As these tasks currently rely on labor-intensive manual analysis by experts, we hope that in the process of developing our AI-based tool future forensic linguistic analysis can be facilitated.

Keywords:

Teaching forensic linguistics, legal English, expanding curricula, AI-based text analysis, authorship analysis, speaker recognition