The Psycholinguistics Research Group and FORGE are delighted to announce a joint talk by our upcoming external speaker: David Kernot (Australian Department of Defence, Science and Technology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
The Application of Stylometric Analysis to Fake News: The statistical analysis of language variations for identity

ABSTRACT
The known and contested works of Shakespeare along with other Elizabethan playwrights have a rich tapestry of research around contested authorship. Using a series of algorithms based on aspects of the human referential process, sensory word use, and internal gender, we highlight several new claims about Shakespeare’s work. Drawing on embodied cognition, the research is then placed within today’s security landscape. By examining adversarial data, extreme, lone actor, and troll messaging, we suggest that early signs of radicalisation might exist to cue bigger systems.

TIME & PLACE
1230-1330, Tue 17^th Mar, Fylde D18

All are welcome to attend.

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Luke Harding (LAEL). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Misleading silence under the Australian Consumer Law: Perspectives from linguistics

ABSTRACT
This talk considers the phenomenon of “misleading silence” as it is currently applied in a particular area of private law in the Australian legal system: section 18 (s 18) of the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). Misleading silence is of theoretical and practical interest in the case of s 18 as, according to that provision, “a person must not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive”. Yet the treatment of misleading silence is under-examined in academic scholarship around s 18, particularly with respect to linguistic perspectives on silence and their implications for understanding the operation of s 18. In this talk, I will first illustrate how misleading silence has been interpreted in cases decided under s 18. Second, I will discuss two distinctions that have figured as organising ideas in interpreting misleading silence under s 18, providing a critique from a linguistic perspective on silence. Finally, I will suggest some ways in which a consideration of misleading silence in s 18 cases opens up interesting lines of enquiry for research at the intersection of linguistics and the law.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Thu 27^th Feb, County South D72

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that due to the upcoming strike action, Ryan Boyd’s talk has been cancelled. We will reschedule later this or early next academic year.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our external guest speaker: Kate Barber (T) (Cardiff University). Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
The reframing of rape in extremist online discourses

NOTES
THIS TALK IS ON A TOPIC, AND WILL CONTAIN EXTRACTS OF DATA, THAT SOME MAY FIND DISTRESSING.

DISCRETION IS STRONGLY ADVISED.

ABSTRACT

Linguistic analyses of far-right discourses have traditionally focused on nationalist rhetoric or racist and ethnoreligious-based invective. The explicit anti-feminist stance held by some far-right groups, specifically in relation to sexual offences against women, remains underexplored. This paper outlines initial findings from an ongoing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 100 blog posts on sites identifying as belonging to the Alternative Right (Alt-Right) or the right-wing men’s activist movement known as the Manosphere. While these factions can be distinguished by their primary concerns towards racial diversity (Alt-Right), and men’s rights (Manosphere), this study aims to highlight how their discourses converge in their portrayal of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence against women.

This paper outlines preliminary findings from the second and third year of my PhD research. Using corpus linguistics and a discourse analytical framework based largely on van Dijk’s (1984) and Koller’s (2012) sociocognitive approach to discourse studies and collective identity analysis, the paper discusses how inhabited and ascribed identities promote white male victimhood and portray the mainstream concept of rape culture as a ‘feminist-produced moral panic’ (Gotell & Dutton 2016, p. 65). The presentation includes details of the network analysis I undertook in order to locate the online websites and blogs from which I selected my data; corpora construction; and a comparative analysis of racist and misogynistic constructions of identity in narrative and non-narrative discourses. Finally, some of the ongoing challenges this research has presented will be discussed along with the importance of applying linguistic analyses to develop inoculation narratives (Braddock 2019) and other counter-extremism measures.

References
Braddock, K. (2019). Vaccinating Against Hate: Using Attitudinal Inoculation to Confer Resistance to Persuasion by Extremist Propaganda. Terrorism and Political Violence. DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2019.1693370
Gotell, L. & Dutton, E. (2016). Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere’: Antifeminist Men’s Rights Discourses on Rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. 5(2), 65-80.
Koller, V. (2012). How to Analyse Collective Identity in Discourse – Textual and Contextual Parameters. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines. 5(2), 19-38.
van Dijk, T.A. (1984). Prejudice and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The talk will be approximately 30-40 minutes in total, with around 10-20 minutes at the end for Q&A.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 13th Feb, County South D72.

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that due to upcoming strike action, Ryan Boyd’s talk has been rescheduled. You can see the updated date, time, and room here.

Please note that Danuta Kot’s talk has been cancelled. We will hopefully reschedule this within this academic year.

FORGE is delighted to announce a talk by our upcoming internal speaker: Ryan Boyd (Psychology). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
Predatory Parlance: Understanding the Social Psychology of Online Sexual Predators

ABSTRACT
Internet sex stings have become popular throughout the US as a way to catch potential child predators before they have the  opportunity to victimize actual children. Customarily, online conversations between undercover agents and accused offenders are submitted as evidence in the prosecution of these cases. These chats may be used by prosecutors to demonstrate several aspects of the accused’s psychological profile, such as grooming strategies, the extent to which offenders engaged in rapport building or sexual conversations, and the degree to which offenders controlled/dominated the conversations with their online victims. Using psychologically-grounded language analysis methods across two studies, we analyze transcripts in order to gain a glimpse into the motives, intentions, and other psychological processes of the accused as well as the conduct of undercover agents.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Thu 12^th Mar, County South D72

All are welcome to attend.

Please note that, due to unavoidable circumstances, this talk has been cancelled. With luck, we hope to reschedule in the near future.

The FORGE and the LAEL Society are delighted to announce our first joint external guest speaker of 2019: Danuta Kot. Danuta is a crime novelist who has written books featuring forensic linguistics. Details of her talk are below:

TITLE
Language, Crime, and Death

ABSTRACT
Please be aware that this talk will involve reference to criminal cases, including murder.

Our language tells more about us than we realise – every time we speak or write, we give away things we don’t intend. This is the field of the forensic linguist, searching for the truth that is hiding behind the words. This talk looks at aspects of forensic linguistics: the man who was hanged because the word ‘the’ appeared in his statement – or did it? It also looks at the ways a novelist can weave stories around the secrets hidden in language.

BIO
Danuta Kot (who also writes as Danuta Reah) published her first novel, Only Darkness, in 1999. She has subsequently written eight novels, the latest being Life Ruins. She has also published prize winning short stories. Crime – or dissent – runs in the family. Her father was declared an enemy of the state by Stalin, and one of her ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered in 1646 for his religious beliefs.

You can find out more about Danuta’s work and life at her websites (here and here). Danuta is also on Twitter and Facebook. [cancelled]

TIME & PLACE
W07, 1300-1500, Wed 20^th Nov, Management School Lecture Theatre 5 [cancelled]

In collaboration with the Linguistics & English Language Department in general, FORGE is delighted to announce our very first talk of the year by our upcoming internal speakers: William Dance and Claire Hardaker (LAEL). Details of the talk are below:

TITLE
Engagement and impact in media and policy: life above and beyond the thesis

ABSTRACT
Undertaking a thesis is, for many people, one of the greatest challenges of their lives, but there can be a tendency to focus simply on getting to, and passing the viva, and then life after that moment can come as an entirely unplanned surprise. In this talk, Claire briefly discusses how, in her role as a supervisor, she guides her students through the maze of impact and engagement – whether with the media, policy makers, practitioners, or beyond – as a way of paving the road for life, and a career, after the thesis. William then gives concrete examples of how his path through engagement and impact is currently playing out for him day to day as a PhD student, including reflections on creating and building his public profile, undertaking a Cabinet Office internship, working with journalists both behind the scenes and in front, and more besides.

Whilst this talk will mainly be about engagement during PhD studies, it may also be useful to MA students and ECRs.

The talk will be approximately 30-40 minutes in total, with around 10-20 minutes at the end for Q&A.

TIME & PLACE
1300-1400, Fri 18^th Oct, Management School LT11

All are welcome to attend.

The FORGE is delighted to announce our third external speaker: Olu Popoola (University of Birmingham). Details of his talk are below:

TITLE
“It’s the story, stupid!” How MARV (Multivariate Analysis of Register Variation) can save the world from fake news.

ABSTRACT
Computer-aided fake news detection can be a useful complement to human efforts. On its own, fact-checking is often too slow to prevent the viral spread of disinformation; debunking news stories and communicating corrections can also have a backfire effect of reinforcing the false belief (Lazer et al. 2018). Most computational methods frame fake news detection as a text classification task (Shu et al. 2017) and so require data pre-labelled for veracity. However, the complexities of defining fake news (e.g. fabricated facts or undisclosed advertising?), the different types of fake news (imposter news vs. low-quality news vs. inaccurate news), the difficulty in establishing objective ground truth as well as the weaponization and dilution of ‘fake news’ as a concept leave the collection of pre-labelled data fraught with epistemological issues.

Semi-supervised multivariate statistical techniques may overcome these limitations by modelling news veracity as a latent variable whose value can be estimated from the presence of deception clues and a novel deception scoring approach. This study tested the hypothesis that i) there is significant linguistic variation within the online news genre and that ii) variation is correlated with deceptive situational parameters of communication. Multivariate register analysis was conducted on 5000 stories from the political section of 15 online news sources selected as representative of the online news ecosystem (i.e. a mix of UK and US legacy and new online media from across the full political spectrum). Linguistic parameters were defined from a feature set combining lexico-grammatical and cohesion-based features; situational parameters were drawn from expert-defined fake news detection heuristics and used to calculate a deception score. Visualisation techniques (Diwersy, Evert and Neumann, 2014) were used to assess whether this situational analysis revealed any dimensions of deception and deceptive text clusters.

The study found that linguistic variation in the online news genre is highly correlated with the probability of veracity, with absence of narrative the main indicator of potential deception. This result was unexpected as storytelling is generally associated with deception. However, in the context of a profession which places supreme value on the news story it makes sense that narrative register is a key veracity indicator. Semi-supervised multivariate analysis with deception scoring emerges as a viable alternative to text classification for automated deception detection in epistemologically challenging genres.

REFERENCES
Diwersy, S., Evert, S. and Neumann, S., 2014. A weakly supervised multivariate approach to the study of language variation. Aggregating dialectology, typology, and register analysis. linguistic variation in text and speech, pp.174-204.

Lazer, D.M., Baum, M.A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A.J., Greenhill, K.M., Menczer, F., Metzger, M.J., Nyhan, B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D. and Schudson, M., 2018. The science of fake news. Science, 359(6380), pp.1094-1096.

Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J. and Liu, H., 2017. Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), pp.22-36.

BIO
Olu Popoola is a PhD candidate researching methods for cross-domain deception detection at the University of Birmingham, and moonlights as a deception detection trainer and OSINT investigator. By day, Olu is a Teaching Fellow at Aston University where he teaches information integrity to future health professionals (a third career, following ten years in advertising and consumer research and another ten in English language teaching). Olu is married with two canal boats and a cat.

TIME & PLACE
1100-1200, Wed 20^th Mar, County South B89