The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speaker: Prof Paul J. Taylor (Psychology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Email Physics: What can we infer about hierarchies, groupiness and deceit from everyday emails

ABSTRACT
Much can be inferred from the way an author changes his or her language during social interaction. I will describe our efforts to measure linguistic accommodation (or verbal mimicry if you’re a psychologist) and how these measures can be used to infer social position and social motive. I will report one study that demonstrates how mimicry in email replies varies as a function of recipient closeness in a way that fulfills Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis. I will report a second study that shows how a reduction in language mimicry amongst coworkers may be used to detect workers attempting an insider attack on their organisation.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 30th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our first ever internal speaker: Dr Alistair Baron (Computing & Communications; Security Lancaster). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Using language analysis to predict age and gender with fake online personas

ABSTRACT
There are a variety of reasons why people choose to use fake profiles online, ranging from the perfectly innocent to deception in order to commit serious crimes. I will demonstrate how differences in language use can be utilised to predict age and gender, even when individuals are attempting to hide their true identity. The irregular nature of online texts poses significant barriers to language analysis, but by pre-processing texts with spelling normalisation, much of the negative impact can be nullified. It will also be shown that the spelling irregularities themselves can be used to aid age and gender prediction.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 09th Oct, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend. Note that this venue has a maximum seating capacity of 20.

IF YOU MISSED IT:

You can watch an earlier version of this talk.