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University researchers are developing a system to help identify people who are behind offensive comments posted on the internet.
Linguistic experts at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) are working with police and child protection agencies to develop an automated system to recognise language patterns.
Claire Hardaker, lecturer in linguistics and English language at UCLAN, said: "Everyone has a unique way of writing, of putting certain words together, which is subconscious.
"Someone might be pretending to be someone else, but by analysing the way they write online, we can determine a probable, age, gender - even a probable region from where they come from.
"In its simplest form, people use different words for things - for example a bread roll. Some people would say a tea cake, some people would say a barm - it is these sort of elements that help to narrow down a search."
Researchers at the university in Preston will spend the next year working with Merseyside and Greater Manchester Police, as well as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), to develop a linguistic profiling system.
Ms Hardaker said: "The analysis process is currently done by hand by a linguistic specialist manually analysing online text. "We are looking to develop an automated computer system to analyse the different components of written text.
"If the police have a suspect paedophile, for example, we can work with them to help to identify whether different posts across different sites were actually written by the same person."
Originally posted by Qumulys
C U L8R lol
^Thats how the latest generation speaks, this tech could prove very hit and miss, especially with the globalisation of the worlds communications. At increasing rates, countries worldwide are adopting new catch phrases, just like the 'cowabunga dude' of the late eighties early nineties. As we narrow our linguistic diversity, I can see their algorithms starting to flounder.edit on 17-3-2012 by Qumulys because: (no reason given)