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

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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.

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

TITLE

Sounds familiar: How does a listener’s familiarity with a voice affect their ability to detect an AI-generated version of that voice?

ABSTRACT

Recent technological advancements mean that AI-generated speech has rapidly advanced in quality, to the point where it can be virtually indistinguishable from genuine human speech. This opens the door to a new breed of cybercrime: one which utilises AI to create fraudulent representations of a target’s speech in an attempt to deceive listeners into believing that they are genuine. Presently, curbing this deception is difficult, since the conditions dictating accurate discrimination between genuine and synthetic speech are little understood. This talk examines one factor: a potential victim’s familiarity with the speaker’s voice. When the speaker’s voice is well-known to a listener (i.e. a celebrity or loved one), does this impact the listener’s ability to recognise an AI-generated sample of that speaker’s voice? If so, why? What other factors may also be at play, and how might those factors interact with familiarity to influence the potential victim’s performance? With the insights gained by addressing these questions, we begin to give ourselves the tools to mitigate against AI-mediated cybercrime.

TIME & PLACE

W04, 1500-1550, Thu 31st Oct 2024, Bowland North SR20. (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 a cross-over talk with the LAEL 50th Anniversary Lecture Series by FACTOR member Dr Isobelle Clarke (LAEL, Lancaster University):

TITLE

The shared anti-science discourses

ABSTRACT

Anti-science discourse has been studied through the optic of particular governments (Carter et al., 2019) or specific topics, such as anti-vaccination (Davis, 2019), anti-genetically modified organisms (Cook et al. 2004), stem cell research (Marcon, Murdoch and Caulfield, 2017), and climate denial discourse (Park, 2015). This research often details the development and content of the anti-science position and discourses. Yet, little is known about how the discourses compare across topics. Are there anti-science discourses that are shared across topics or does the discourse vary with the topic? In this talk, I will present the results of the common discourses which are shared between texts from website known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy on the topics of stem cells, climate change, vaccination and genetically modified organisms.

TIME & PLACE

W02, 1800-2000, Thu 24th Oct 2024, Faraday LT.

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REGISTRATION

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FACTOR is pleased to announce our first talk of the 2024-2025 academic year by Dr Sebastian Muth (LAEL, Lancaster University):

TITLE

Language assistance at His Majesty’s Prisons (HMPs)

ABSTRACT

In the past years, His Majesty’s Prison & Parole Service (HMPPS) has experienced a growth in the number of foreign national offenders (FNOs) who speak limited English or no English (Hunter et al., 2022). Studies to date show that inability to communicate may lead to increased rates of mental health problems, self-harm, and suicides among prisoners (Martínez-Gómez, 2018; Valero-Garcés, 2018). Unfortunately, little is known about language assistance offered by HMPPS.

In this presentation I will present preliminary findings from a research project that investigates, how prisons ensure language access to vital services such as healthcare, legal counselling, complaints procedures or education. I will draw from both survey data of prison staff as well as ethnographic data from prison visits conducted in cooperation with HMPPS Diversity & Inclusion throughout 2023 and 2024. Aimed to better understand how HMPs evaluate language needs, findings highlight several challenges that disproportionally affect FNOs with little or no English skills. These include a lack of language assistance around safeguarding, family visits, prison rules and communication by the Home Office as well as inconsistent support in legal communication, healthcare, training, resettlement and in learning English. Furthermore, there is a profound dissatisfaction with services provided by the contracted provider for interpreting- and translation services.

• Hunter, G. (2022). Language barriers in the criminal justice system. The Bell Foundation.
• Martínez-Gómez, A. (2018). Language, translation and interpreting policies in prisons: Protecting the rights of speakers of non-official languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 251. 151–172.
• Valero-Garcés, C. (2018). Language policy in prisons at the crossroads: The voice of foreign inmates. The Open Journal of Criminology and Sociology 1. 63–70.

TIME & PLACE

W02, 1500-1550, Thu 17th Oct 2024, Bowland North SR2. (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.

FORGE is pleased to announce a talk hosted by Security Lancaster. Note that whilst this talk isn’t linguistics-focused, it will have some relevance for linguists looking to work in defence, protection, security, intelligence, and forensic contexts. This talk is by Prof Corinne May-Chahal and Sam Maesschalck (Lancaster University), and further details can be found below:

TITLE

Surveillance conversation breakfast session: Police surveillance in social media

ABSTRACT

Drawing on two recent studies we aim to open a conversation on the current relationship between digital tools, crime detection and social media. The first investigates how two police forces operating in very different contexts, based in England and Pakistan, obtain evidence from social media within criminal investigations. This research reports on the identification of social media platforms used for potentially criminal activity; how electronic evidence is obtained and searched in police practice; how social media and technology have impacted ‘the copper’s nose’. The second reports on technical developments in the field of policing child sexual abuse online including workarounds in E2EE environments.  An overriding question is not just how far could, or should, the police go but how far technical researchers should enable them to do so?

TIME & PLACE

W05, 0900-1030, Tue 08th Nov 2022, InfoLab21 D55. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

UCREL and FORGE are pleased to announce the next FORGE speaker of the academic year: Dr Shengnan Liu (Lancaster University, CREST). Details of the talk can be found below:

TITLE

Assessing hybrid identities in online extremist communities through sociolinguistic styles

ABSTRACT

Style-shifting has been the focus of language variation and change in sociolinguistics since 1960s. As sociolinguistic styles are sensitive to social change (Ure, 1982), it is not surprising that they have become a focus of social psychologists who seek to assess social identities through linguistic styles. ASIA (Automated Social Identity Assessment toolkit) (Koschate et al., 2021), a toolkit which leverages machine learning and natural language processing to automatically assess which identity is situationally salient through sociolinguistic styles, has been proven to be successful in assessing feminist and parent identity in Reddit and Mumsnet online communities. Cork et al (2022) has applied ASIA to assess entrepreneur and libertarian identities. With an interest on the recent rise in online influence of hybrid communities which are characterised by ideological mutations, this study investigates the dynamic nature and influence of hybrid eco-fascist identities. It trains and validates an ASIA model to automatically assess which identity (eco or fascist) is situationally salient. This allows us to examine the dynamic interplay of these identities over time, and the role that linguistic style plays in the expression of the ecological and the fascist identities in eco-fascist movements. To train the model, the study used Reddit data form environmental and far-right forums that were publicly available for the period 2016-2020. Once trained, ASIA was applied to public data from Reddit eco-fascist forums. Topic modelling and corpus linguistics analysis are then adopted to validate the results produced by the ASIA model. The results demonstrate that 1) social linguistics styles can indeed be used to detect and assess hybrid identities, 2) interdisciplinary research on hybrid identity assessment provides new methodological and theoretical insights to social psychology, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics.

TIME & PLACE

W09, 1400-1450, Thu 08th Dec 2022, Room TBC.

FORGE is pleased to announce a talk hosted by Security Lancaster. Note that whilst this talk isn’t linguistics-focused, it will have some relevance for linguists looking to work in defence, protection, security, intelligence, and forensic contexts, and especially for students interested in devising a research project in this area. This talk is by Nicholas Taylor (Senior Principal Analyst, Exploration Division, UK MoD, Dstl), and further details can be found below:

TITLE

Careers and Research with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD)

ABSTRACT

Nicholas Taylor will discuss careers in the MoD and provide an overview of research areas of interest to Dstl and the UK Ministry of Defence. This might be of interest to students devising research proposals in the coming months. Nicholas will also discuss the possibilities for assistance from Dstl/MoD with research projects.

SPEAKER

Nicholas Taylor is a Senior Principal Analyst in the Exploration Division of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).  In this role he leads research and analysis on deterrence and other strategic effects.  He has pioneered a new approach to the development and implementation of cross-government deterrence strategies, and now heads its application in UK Government and advises senior decision-makers on deterrence issues.

TIME & PLACE

W03, 1000-1050, Tue 25th Oct 2022, Bowland North Seminar Room 10. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)