FIRST ROUNDTABLE ON PRACTICES AND STANDARDS IN FORENSIC AUTHORSHIP ANALYSIS (OVERVIEW 4)
The article provides an overview of the reports of the final discussion of the 1st Roundtable on Practices and Standards in Forensic Authorship Analysis held by the International Association of Forensic Linguistics and the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester on May 15, 2019. Once again, the current topics raised during the round table are discussed: the importance of taking into account the frequency of function words in comparison with notional ones and the impact of various factors (style, genre of the text, author's idiostyle, communication strategy) on the frequency of function words, the regulation of the procedures of forensic linguistic expertise by judicial authorities, the validation of the methods of authorship analysis used in practice, the role of formalized methods and the researcher's intuition in the analysis, the scientific and legal aspects of using the data array available on the Internet (including video messages and video conversations), the reference to the best practices of corpus linguistics, the compilation of highly specialized language corpora, the selection of computer programs for analyzing text data arrays, the use automated speech recognition, the interaction between manual and automated computer analysis, the prioritizing of alphabetic or verbal Ngrams depending on the material under study. During the discussions, questions were asked both by the speakers and those present at the round table, as well as by experts who watched the event online. In his closing remarks, the moderator expressed his intention to organize this round table annually to discuss new ideas and achievements in the field of forensic analysis in a timely manner.