Forensic Linguistics Applications for Determining Disputed Authorship of Digital Communications via Quantitative Stylometry

Abstract

Court cases involving authorship just as in the cyber world have been on an unprecedented peak with the rapid growth of digital communication media, in the form of emails, instant messaging and social media. The anonymity, brevity and informality of online text are quite challenging insofar as attempting to identify the real author of digitally produced texts. In this paper, will endeavor to respond to these issues by applying quantitative stylometric approaches of authorship attribution of online messages. The unique writing patterns found in the methodology are by using a series of linguistic measures which are Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD), frequency of function words and character-level n-grams. As has been illustrated in this discussion, one can differentiate between the authors of texts using these stylometric characteristics since outline coherent lexical, syntactic and structural characteristics. These findings highlight the fact that, despite the brevity and the informality of texts, stylistic cues that can be quantified may be applied to effectively determine the author. It is a supplement to the growing literature on forensic linguistics because it presents an empirically valid and theoretically sound way of identifying the authorship and finds an application in the field of cybercrime investigations, plagiarism and linguistic evidence in the court of law.