Metaphor is a pervasive feature of discourse and a powerful lens for examining cognition, emotion, and ideology. Large-scale analysis, however, has been constrained by the need for manual annotation d...

Conference on Natural Language Processing

Speech and Language Processing

Iconicity ratings studies have established that there are many English words which native speakers judge as “iconic,” that is, as sounding like what they mean. Here, we explore whether these iconic E...

Abstract Garnering public engagement with academic research in a timely and accessible manner has become a central concern in contemporary academia. This centrality has given rise to a growing interes...

On Monday Dr James Tompkinson (University of York) and I presented our talk on "Assessing the suitability of forensic authorship analysis methodologies for speech data" at the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) 2025 conference at Leiden University (The Hague), where we show some preliminary results about applying some authorship analysis techniques to transcribed speech. You can find the slides of the talk here:

On Monday I delivered a talk at the Comparative Literature Goes Digital Workshop at the Digital Humanities 2025 conference. As part of this talk I have also prepared a tutorial to use our new authorship verification method, LambdaG, to produce text heatmaps to study the idiosyncratic language of an author. This Github repository contains the abstract, a link to the tutorial and the slide of my talk:

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the ‘Writings Wrongs’ podcast. The episode covered the events of the Aiya Napa rape case and the evidence I presented at the trial. Like all other episodes, the hosts do an amazing job explaining everything in detail but in a really accessible way. I highly recommend this episode, as well as the whole podcast! You can find it here:

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders worldwide and may affect an individual’s ability to perform essential life activities. Still, “less than 25 % of individuals with depression recei...

The slides and abstract of our talk "A corpus analysis of idiolectal n-grams" at #CL2025 are now available here:

Presentation slides and reproduction materials for CL 2025 presentation “Finding structure in multivariate data” Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

Welcome to the thirteenth international Corpus Linguistics conference (CL2025), co-organised by Aston University, Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham. CL2025 will take place fr...

A workshop designed especially for PGRs and ECRs, but welcoming participants of all levels from linguistics and adjacent disciplines

The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics is the leading hub for forensic linguistics worldwide. Set up as the Centre for Forensic Linguistics in 2008 by Malcolm Coulthard, it was expanded into a r...