Author Identification In The Forensic Setting
Carole E. Chaski · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012
Abstract Author identification can play a role in the investigation of many different types of crimes, civil transactions, and security issues. Over the last fifteen years, author identification has become increasingly recognized by research-funding agencies, investigative agencies, the forensic science community, and the courts, as a forensic science that deals with pattern evidence. Forensic authorship identification methods, despite their differences, require that similar steps be taken: choosing an appropriate linguistic level, coding, engaging in statistical analysis and decision making, and conducting validation testing. This article presents a review of currently available and emerging methods for identifying authorship in the forensic setting, presents some current methods based on the categorization scheme, and provides some ideas about why some methods fail to obtain high accuracy. Finally, it considers two methods that are currently used in criminal investigations and trials: forensic stylistics and software-generated analysis.