FACTOR is pleased to announce our final talk of the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe (Computing, SPS):

TITLE
Offensive or Not? Are we doing offensive language detection in the correct way?

ABSTRACT
Offensive speech on web platforms is a persistent problem with wide-ranging impacts. There are many automatic content moderation systems that detect offensive content on web platforms. However, among many reasons why these tools fail to eliminate the problem is the reality that people often disagree on what is offensive.

In this talk, I will talk about how content moderation issues arise in political discussions, how machine and human moderators disagree on what is offensive when it comes to real-world social web political discourse and how content moderation research should address them. I will then present my broader vision of integrating this idea into other subjective natural language processing tasks.

TIME & PLACE

W18, 1500-1550, Thu 06th Mar 2025, Bowland North SR10. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Ellen Roberts (LAEL, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Jingle jangle fallacies: observations and learnings from a replication of Biber (1988)

ABSTRACT

Multidimensional analysis (MDA) is a well-established method for the study of textual linguistic variation. It is a method that is often used for register analyses and has been suggested as a means of explaining authorship differences (Grieve 2023). However, the process of conducting an MDA is not straightforward and some replications of the method have failed to reproduce results from other studies (Lee 2000). Recent publications have provided ‘how-to’ guidance on conducting the MDA method across a range of software to try to clarify the methodological process (Egbert and Staples 2019). But how successful has this clarification been?

This talk outlines some of the learnings and pitfalls from an attempted replication of the MDA statistical method of choice, Factor Analysis, as part of my PhD research. This research draws on the psychological notion of jingle and jangle fallacies to explore possible misconceptions in the implementation of factor analysis, following Grieder and Steiner (2022).

More broadly, this presentation aims to demonstrate via this case study, the importance of methodological transparency and sensitivity across different statistical software used across the social sciences and in forensics research more widely.

TIME & PLACE

W15, 1500-1550, Thu 13th Feb 2025, Welcome Centre LT1 (A34). (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Christin Kirchhübel (Principal Consultant, Soundscape Voice Evidence):

TITLE

What’s the (copy)right way? Navigating legal issues around the input and output of large speech and language models

ABSTRACT

Large speech and language models present new challenges for existing copyright law: To what extent does developing these models pose copyright infringement risks? What is the copyright status of the outputs of these models? This talk addresses these two questions, highlighting some of the current conversations and legal cases in this sphere.

TIME & PLACE

W14, 1500-1550, Thu 06th Feb 2025

Teams: Register here

In-person: Welcome Centre LT1 (A34)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Sophie James (LUMS, SPS, Lancaster University) and Professor James Cronin (LUMS, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Digital Dreamscapes & The Spectralisation Of Reality

ABSTRACT

Following arguments that the sociology of tourism extends beyond the movement of bodies between physical locations to include ‘mind-voyaging’ throughout cyberspace, we consider digitally networked horror consumption as a nascent variant of dark tourism. In this paper, the acts of seeking out and spending time in digital dreamscapes centred on the weird, eerie and abject – such as ‘creepypasta’, Reddit’s ‘r/nosleep’ and 4chan’s ‘/x/paranormal’ discussion boards – are theorised as journeys that endow the familiar with obscene libidinal energy. These sites do not offer an escape from ordinary reality, rather they enable some detail of reality itself to become spectralised and thus reinterpreted with a nightmarish dreamlike quality. Drawing upon and adapting a Žižekian toolbox, we consider the touristic appeal of digitally networked horror consumption as derived from an ontological incompleteness which, in today’s post-historical geographies of ‘nothing’ (where most places are mapped, commodified, and demystified), provides the fantasy of exclusive and uncharted territory beyond a finite, knowable universe. The possibility that the otherworldly might still be found within our world, albeit in remediated forms online, legitimises digital dreamscapes as the final frontier for dark tourists seeking out the unsettling, while their free-to-access and typically non-copyrighted content functions beyond the rationalising influence of capitalist realism. Although they ostensibly deviate from the overt commercialism that has come to contaminate most physical sites for dark tourism, these digital dreamscapes also seem to reject historical authenticity and morality, centring instead on mythology, simulacra, and sublimating the anomalous. Cybersecurity concerns associated with these online spaces arise from the risks of anonymity-driven misinformation, the spread of malicious content, and potentially, significant dangers for individuals with pre-existing psychological conditions who may struggle with the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction.

TIME & PLACE

W12, 1500-1550, Thu 23rd Jan 2025, Welcome Centre LT1 (A34). (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce a talk from PhonLab by Dr Kirsty McDougall (Cambridge University):

TITLE

Forensic phonetics and speaker characteristics

TALK

Dr. Kirsty McDougall is an Associate Professor of Phonetics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. With an academic career spanning linguistics and forensic phonetics, her expertise lies in speaker characteristics, phonetic variation in varieties of English, and the practical applications of forensic phonetics in criminal justice. She leads groundbreaking research on improving voice identification procedures, addressing the challenges of voice distinctiveness and speaker comparisons.

Dr. McDougall has been involved in several innovative projects, including the DyViS (Dynamic Variability in Speech) study, which explored forensic speaker comparison methods, and VoiceSim, focusing on voice similarity and earwitness evidence. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics and applied forensic practices, enhancing the understanding of how phonetics can aid in criminal investigations.

Dr. McDougall’s work bridges the intersections of linguistic theory, speaker identification, and forensic applications, highlighting the cutting-edge research shaping the future of forensic linguistics.

TIME & PLACE

W12, 1500-1550, Tue 21st Jan 2025, County South B89 and Teams.

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Hansi Hettiarachchi (Computing, SPS, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Temporal word dynamics for online event detection in social media streams

ABSTRACT

In today’s digital era, social media have become primary platforms for disseminating newsworthy content, with most internet users relying on them for regular updates. Thus, understanding and detecting important events from social media data streams is vital for various applications ranging from crisis management to market analysis. However, the vast volume and unstructured nature of this data, generated by a diverse range of users, make manual detection methods highly labour-intensive. As a result, automated intelligent mechanisms have become essential for efficiently handling event detection tasks. However, most available social media event detection approaches primarily rely on data statistics, ignoring semantics, making them vulnerable to critical information loss. Following this gap, this presentation will explore how temporal word dynamics can be involved in achieving effective event detection from social media data.

TIME & PLACE

W09, 1500-1550, Thu 05th Dec 2024, Bowland North SR02. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

REGISTRATION

For accessibility, fire, and safety compliance, please register before attending.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Greta Esposito (PhD student in Linguistics, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Human interpretation and machine translation in law enforcement settings

ABSTRACT

Interpretation and translation services are widely used and accounted for in criminal justice systems across the world, where individuals who don’t speak the language of the legal systems they live in are legally entitled to be provided with language assistance (Art 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights).

However, as the form that this language assistance takes on varies from country to country, my research focuses only on interpretation and translation practices in the criminal justice system of England and Wales, and, specifically, on police interpreting and machine translation in the police context.

As police interpreting remains still under-researched, and linguistic outputs deriving from non-optimal interpretation/translation practices in the police setting can have serious legal consequences for the investigative process and the individuals involved, this talk will focus on (1) the reasons why linguistic analysis of authentic police data – interpreter-assisted police interviews in this case – could result in enhanced police practices in regard to interviewing strategies and the use of interpretation/translation services; (2) my hypotheses regarding the viability of machine translation software in high-stakes scenarios; and (3) the challenges I have faced so far in regard to data access, communicating with police forces and conveying the main points of my research to them.

If bridging the gap between academia and external institutions/bodies is the goal, sometimes it can be very difficult to achieve!

TIME & PLACE

W07, 1500-1550, Thu 21st Nov 2024, Bowland North SR02. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

REGISTRATION

For accessibility, fire, and safety compliance, please register before attending.

FACTOR is pleased to announce our next talk in the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Lena Podoletz (Law, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Emotional AI in action: will it change crime, crime prevention, policing and security, and why this matters?

ABSTRACT

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states, intentions and attitudes of people utilising data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. When it comes to using language as such source of data, experimental tools are being developed to detect and, sometimes, even to try and forecast criminal behaviour. Cyberbullying, terrorism and digital forms of hate speech and fraud are some of the main areas where such developments are in the making. At this moment, these tools are still in their very early years. This talk considers their implications for ethics, privacy, human and procedural rights, as well as the existing evidence base for performance.

TIME & PLACE

W05, 1500-1550, Thu 07th Nov 2024, Bowland North SR10. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

Find information on how to get to campus here, and how to navigate campus buildings here.

REGISTRATION

For accessibility, fire, and safety compliance, please register before attending.