WORKSHOP: Forensic Authorship Identification Workshop

Brooklyn Law School, Brooklyn NY

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is for a Workshop on Forensic Authorship Identification that will be held at the Brooklyn Law School. The workshop will bring together (1) leading computer scientists and computational linguists from around the world, whose work on authorship attribution has been yielding impressive results; (2) American legal scholars who specialize in the admissibility of scientific evidence in court; and (3) scholars specializing in statistical analysis. The interdisciplinary workshop will include discussion of the algorithms being developed and assessed, the error rates associated with these approaches, and the theoretical contributions of linguistic and psychological sciences to understanding forensic authorship identification. Legal experts will contribute to discussion of the standards for admissibility of scientific evidence, and the potential contributions of this area of forensic science to criminal and civil practice. The workshop will give scholars in the field the opportunity to present their work to scholars in scientific evidence to determine how well the state of the art stands up to current legal standards, and to spark theoretical, empirical, and methodological innovation by sharing reactions with each other and hearing from leading statisticians. Proceedings of the workshop will be published in Brooklyn Law School's Journal of Law & Policy. A web platform for dissemination of scholarship and information about authorship attribution in the courts will also be developed and launched as part of this project.