Ethical Considerations for Expert Witnesses in Forensic Linguistics

Commentary: is the plot thickening for partisan forensic expert witnesses?

Knowledge of the past has a powerful way of clarifying the challenges of the present. Dr. Weiss enables the reader to exploit this phenomenon as it applies to the important perennial struggle of the expert witness for objectivity.

Forensic Linguistics and Forensic Phonetics: An Introduction

Communication is the essence of human civilization. Life would not have been possible without this cognitive faculty. However, with evolution in civilization instances of criminal activities are also on the increase. This paper introduces one such scientific discipline which has the potential to provide an authentic framework for such identifications. It is called Forensic Linguistics. Each ind...

The testimony of forensic identification science: what expert witnesses say and what factfinders hear.

This research examined how variations in the presentation of forensic science information affect factfinders' judgments in a trial. Participants read a summary of a murder case, the critical testimony being the results of a microscopic hair comparison given by a forensic expert. Across two experiments we manipulated how the expert expressed his results, whether he gave an explicit conclusion co...

Ethical Questions in NLP Research: The (Mis)-Use of Forensic Linguistics

Ideas from forensic linguistics are now being used frequently in Natural Language Processing (NLP), using machine learning techniques. While the role of forensic linguistics was more benign earlier, it is now being used for purposes which are questionable. Certain methods from forensic linguistics are employed, without considering their scientific limitations and ethical concerns. While we take...

WOMEN AS EXPERT WITNESSES 2 Women as Expert Witnesses: A Review of the Literature