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.)

PhonLab and FORGE are pleased to announce the next FORGE speaker of the academic year: Dr Christin Kirchhübel (Principal Consultant, Soundscape Voice Evidence). Details of the talk can be found below:

TITLE

Voice Analysis as evidence – the need for competency testing!

ABSTRACT

I will start the talk by giving a brief outline of the landscape surrounding the provision of evidential voice analysis services in the UK. I will then discuss the importance of integrating competency testing into the life of a forensic speech science practitioner. I highlight the challenges, but also present possible solutions.

TIME & PLACE

W07, 1400-1450, Mon 21st Nov 2022, County South C89. (Please note that this talk will not be streamed or recorded.)

UCREL and FORGE are pleased to announce the second FORGE speakers of the academic year: Prof Tim Grant and Dr Lucia Busso (York). Details of the talk can be found below:

TITLE

FoLD: a permanent, controlled-access, online repository for forensic linguistic research

ABSTRACT

This talk presents an innovative online resource for sharing and accessing forensic linguistics data, the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD – https://fold.aston.ac.uk), developed in the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics (AIFL)  at Aston University, Birmingham. FoLD is a permanent, controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data, including malicious communication data, investigative interview data, hate speech, and legal language.

Since access to relevant forensic linguistic data has been notoriously challenging since the conception of the discipline in the 1960s, FoLD represents the first attempt to provide researchers with the opportunity of sharing datasets of different levels of sensitivity and ethical concern.

In this talk we present the FoLD repository, how to donate data, and how to access already existing datasets from the website.

We further showcase a project carried out by researchers in the FoLD research centre at AIFL using data from FoLD.

TIME & PLACE

W04, 1400-1450, Mon 31st Oct 2022. Teams.

PhonLab and FORGE are pleased to announce the first FORGE speaker of the academic year: Dr Vincent Hughes (York). Details of the talk can be found below:

TITLE

Why uncertainty matters in forensics… (phonetics, sociophonetics, and just about everything else)

TIME & PLACE

W02, 1500-1550, Tue 18th Oct 2022. County South C89 or Teams.