A Research Agenda for Online Linguistic Surveillance of Threatening Messages
Brian H. Spitzberg, Jean Mark Gawron · 2016
Threats are by definition a communicative act, and as such, it becomes an essential obligation of the field of communication to ascertain what they communicate, and when they communicate imminent credible risk. This paper proposes a research- and theory-based set of over 20 potential linguistic risk indicators through which corpora of actual online threat messages may discriminate credible from non-credible threats. Some of these are obviously easier to code automatically than others, but all can be rated, and used as potential construct validation criteria. Rating scales are proposed, existing threat corpora are identified, and some prospective computational linguistic procedures are identified. Implications for ongoing threat surveillance and its applications are explored.