How good are LLMs at identifying and tagging metaphors in text? Turns out, pretty good! In our new study, we ask 10 different open- and closed-source LLMs to label all metaphorical expressions in a dataset of film reviews using <Metaphor> and </Metaphor> XML tags. arxiv.org/abs/2509.24866

The Derek Bentley Case 👇 In a gripping two-part series, the Writing Wrongs podcast investigates one of the UK’s most infamous miscarriages of justice: the tragic story of Derek Bentley, who was sentenced to death in 1953.

If you're attending Konvens 2025 at Hildesheim, don't miss our tutorial on Reading Concordances with Algorithms tomorrow, where we talk about our mathematical framework and given some background on the FlexiConc library. konvens-2025.hs-hannover.de/program/#fle... @rc21project.bsky.social

📢 Season 2 of Writing Wrongs kicks off tomorrow! 📢 The first episode is a two-parter exploring the classic case of #DerekBentley. We're joined by Prof. Malcolm Coulthard whose analysis contributed to Derek's posthumous acquittal. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

Pat Strycharczuk will be presenting our paper at #Interspeech2025 on Wednesday afternoon (A02-O6), where we applied forensic speaker comparison methods to ultrasound tongue imaging data to think about the individuality of articulatory strategy 📄 www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...

Super excited to share our new multimodal corpus analysis, "Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures" 🥳 Project led by our PhD student Ell Wilding and in collab w/ @jeannettel.bsky.social & @mperlman.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

📢📃 New open access 🔓 paper with @perez-paredes.bsky.social in @registerstudies.bsky.social: Exploring public-oriented research communication - A register perspective. You can find the paper here: doi.org/10.1075/rs.2... & some details in the 🧵 below⬇️ @mcrlinguistics.bsky.social @um.es

🔊 Dropping this Friday, the Series 1 finale of Writing Wrongs, the AIFL podcast! 🔊 @timgrant123.bsky.social and @drniccimacleod.bsky.social will be answering some of the questions that have come in from listeners over the course of the past 7 episodes 👇👇👇

On Monday, Dr James Tompkinson (University of York) and I presented this paper at the IAFPA 2025 conference, where we showed preliminary results of applying authorship analysis techniques to transcribed speech. You can find the slides at the link below.

Abstract and slides for my #DH2025 talk "Examining an author’s individual grammar" can now be found on my website below. This also includes a tutorial to use LambdaG to study authors' idiosyncratic grammar patterns.

I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on the ‘Writings Wrongs’ podcast, where we discussed the Aiya Napa rape case and my trial evidence. I highly recommend this episode and the whole podcast: https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/forensic-linguistics/writing-wrongs

Excited to have a new open-access article out on online depression discourse in the journal Corpus-based Studies across Humanities, together with my brilliant doctoral student Youngmeen Kim! Check it out at www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...!

The slides and abstract of our talk "A corpus analysis of idiolectal n-grams" at #CL2025 are now available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15806985

In case you missed the QR code during my talk on Geometric Multivariate Analysis @cl2025.co.uk: You can find slides, code, and data at osf.io/9p25y

The Sinclair Lecture by @jwgrieve.bsky.social, mentioned by @lanthony.bsky.social in his plenary speech yesterday, will be held next Monday at 5pm at the University of Birmingham and will also be live-streamed. For details and registration, visit: www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac... #CL2025

It seems that the Cambridge Elements in Corpus Linguistics series is free to download for the duration of #CL2025 again — including my own. I’m never one to pass up a freebie, so do take a look: www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Only two weeks to go! We're working away to finalise the conference programme, featuring: • 200+ paper presentations • 50+ poster presentations • 7 thematic panels • 5 plenary talks • 5 pre-conference workshops (29th June) See you all soon! #CL2025 www.cl2025.co.uk/home

✴️ Episode 6 of 🎧 Writing Wrongs 🎧 podcast out now! ✴️ 👉🎙️The Disputed Confessions of Darnell Rusan🎙️👈 A man confesses to murder - eleven times. But was it his story or the detective’s? @drniccimacleod.bsky.social and @timgrant123.bsky.social chat with Dr Marlon Hurt aston.ac.uk/writing-wrongs

Join us on 7th July for a hybrid workshop on Bayesian regression models for linguistics (and adjacent disciplines), led by @scoretta.bsky.social ✨ A small number of travel bursaries is available to support PGRs and ECRs. Please share! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bayesian-r...

📢 Come work with us 📢 We're recruiting a new Research Assistant to work alongside @drniccimacleod.bsky.social on her project Talking Rape: Operation Soteria and the Police Interview, funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship 👇 jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

'Forensic Conversations' hybrid symposium is BACK! 📆 17 Sep 2025 An informal day of networking, discussions & presentations with researchers using EMCA methods to explore conversations in policing and criminal justice contexts. Reg & call for abstracts now open: darg.lboro.ac.uk/event/forens...

⚡ Open calls for 2 PhD students and 1 postdoc in computational social science / environmental / sustainable transitions studies It's an ERC Consolidator project led by Laur Kanger in the University of Tartu; please share, it's a great place! euraxess.ec.europa.eu/search?keys=...

We are looking for a computational linguist with focus on AI Trust and Security broadly defined. We are interested in people specialising in the study of LLMs and Forensic Linguistics applications would also be very welcome linguistlist.org/issues/36/12...

The official press release and conference video for the upcoming 17th Biennial Conference of IAFLL in Cape Town has been published on our website: iafll.org/2025/04/01/1...

2-year fixed term post in #linguistics at Northumbria - www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMH232/l...

We're recruiting! New fully funded PhD studentship in Forensic Linguistics, starting October 2025: 'Conceptual mapping in psychiatric evidence'. Would you like to work on a research project with @felicitydeamer.bsky.social and @timgrant123.bsky.social? Apply now 👇 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Next Monday I’ll be giving a talk on my latest research on the linguistics of trust and manipulation as part of Hong Kong Poly’s English and Communication seminar series. The talk will be on Zoom and open to all. If you’re interested, you can sign up via the link below!

And we're off! Today with Nicci MacLeod at Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics we've released the first three episodes of our brand new podcast Writing Wrongs 🎙️Follow Writing Wrongs here 👉 podfollow.com/1797795962 #forensiclinguistics #linguistics #truecrime #podcasts #academicsky

We now have actual models that capture (many) real natural languages -- let's not assume we still need good old fashioned rules for syntax or semantics @weissweiler.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social

✨New paper✨ Linguistic evaluations of LLMs often implicitly assume that language is generated by symbolic rules. In a new position paper, @adelegoldberg.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I argue that languages are not Lego sets, and evaluations should reflect this! arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13195

Very excited to announce what @DrNicciMacLeod.bsky.social and I have been working on for the past few months (with a brilliant production team behind us). You can subscribe now and listen to our trailer wherever you get your podcasts. #forensiclinguistics #linguistics #truecrime #academicsky

Very excited to announce the launch of a brand new book series: Bloomsbury Advances in Forensic and Legal Linguistics. It will publish full-length monographs & edited volumes in all areas of the discipline. If you have a book idea developing, or a proposal in the works, then please get in touch.

LLMs can analyze sentence structure for the first time. Metalinguistic ability is one of the rare traits of language/cognition that we don't find in the animal kingdom. We show that the largest LLMs (with chain of thought) can analyze sentence structure as a linguist would.

+1 yes! New work from our lab also reveals strikingly reliable metalinguistic skill on information structure and acceptability tasks: GPT-4 replicates a striking interaction between them despite the 0-shot, explicit nature of the tasks, & little to no chance of contamination (Studies 1a, 1b). 1/2

This is an exciting new arrival. An update to Larry Solan and Peter Tiersma’s seminal 2005 book “Speaking of Crime” A couple of years ago Larry involved Tammy Gales in writing a second edition, in memory of Peter. And sadly with Larry’s death last year, Tammy was left to finish the job.

Absolutely brilliant!

New pre-print from my PhD student Michael Cameron reporting on a pre-reg study showing how individuals are consistent and unique when choosing lex/gram variants, which is evidence for individual entrenchment (with implications for forensic linguistics).

Registration is now OPEN for our free symposium "Forensic Linguistics and the Law", which will showcase interdisciplinary research conducted across these two fields. Join us Friday, March 14 · 1 - 4:50pm GMT (in-person or online) 👇 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/forensic-l...

My latest monograph, "A Theory of Linguistic Individuality for Authorship Analysis", is now open access! Download it for free: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/theory-of-linguistic-individuality-for-authorship-analysis/E52B7B8ADC2B5EC5

Are you an MA student, PhD researcher, postdoc - or have you been using concordance tools all through your career? We are curious to hear about your work! Send us a proposal for a poster 📜 📊 📈 & join us @fau.de in March. And the best bit: 🎁 The event is *free*!

Delighted to announce the pre-publication of this paper; it's one I've wanted to write for a while and was really pleased when Madi Hunter decided to give this the impetus and the heavy lifting that it required. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #academicsky #linguistics #forensicliguistics

One of my talks now available on Youtube, thanks to @rsousasilva.bsky.social

This is fascinating research on George Edalji. I was honoured to be asked by its author to undertake authorship analysis of several of the questioned letters/authors and compare them to Edalji's style. My report is included in the book. #AuthorshipAnalysis #ForensicLinguist

Call for papers - Corpus Linguistics 2025! Closing date for proposals 17th January 2025. More information here: www.cl2025.co.uk

At NTU, we are hiring an Hourly Paid Lecturer who can teach one or more of: ➡️ (Critical) discourse analysis ➡️Language, gender and sexuality ➡️Language and health ➡️Language, inequality and social justice Closing date next Thursday (19th December) vacancies.ntu.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

New paper out 🎺 introducing process-based measures of automatisation in L2 The elicited imitation task is widely used as a measure of automatized L2 knowledge. However, the scoring of the task relies exclusively on product-based measures (i.e., accuracy of L2 production).

Very happy to be giving this free online talk on Thursday.

We are looking for a full-time, temporary teaching-focused Lecturer in Discourse Analysis/Stylistics/Register analysis/forensic linguistics. Details of the job are available here: www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai.... Deadline 12th Dec. Please retweet/share!

Delighted to announce the publication of the Cambridge Element "Decoding Terrorism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Lone-Actor Case" by Julia Kupper, Marie Bosjen-Moller, Tanya Karoli Christensen, @dakwing.bsky.social , Marcus Papadopulos and Sharon Smith www.cambridge.org/core/element...