The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence in 2023
The Hub are happy to be back at work in 2023, with many activities planned for the start of the new year and beyond.
Wrapping up 2022
In wrapping up the Hub’s activities in 2022, which included a symposium we hosted at The University of Melbourne, a visit to the SocioPhonAus workshop in Brisbane, and various publications (for example see Fraser 2022 and Loakes 2022) we should also mention our attendance at two conferences in December. These were ALS 2022 The Australian Linguistics Society annual conference, which was held at The University of Melbourne (Nov 30- Dec 2) and SST 2022 The 18th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (Dec 13-16), which we had indicated we would be attending in a previous blog post. You can read the abstracts of our papers via the preceding link.
AT ALS, the Hub gave a talk (Fraser, Loakes & Knoch) called Developing an accountable evidence-based process for producing reliable transcripts of indistinct forensic audio. This was our first opportunity to talk to an audience about our ongoing work in this area, and we presented some preliminary results from an experiment we have been working on. We are also planning much more work on this topic in 2023, as discussed further below.
SST in December involved quite a lot of activities of interest for the Hub. We started off by attending the tutorial day on Dec 13, giving a Hub tutorial in the afternoon (Fraser & Loakes Specifying new scientific knowledge required by forensic applications). This was well attended in person and online and was a good chance for us to present our views on topics like textual and contextual priming and artificial intelligence, and to have some discussion with tutorial participants. Again, we will be reporting more on these topics in 2023.
On the first day of the conference, there was a keynote on the topic of forensic phonetics by Professor Paul Foulkes, followed by a special session organised by Dr. Yuko Kinoshita (a Hub collaborator, see e.g. here) called Multi-disciplinary approaches to forensic speech science: from different starting points to a shared goal.
This special session was well attended, with three presentations as listed below. You can follow this link if you would like to read the written papers – the forensic session is listed first so they are easy to find.
- Addressing Sampling-Frequency Mismatch between Speech Data Sets in a Forensic Voice Comparison (Hanie Mehdinezhad, Bernard Guillemin and Balamurali B T)
- Likelihood Ratio-based Forensic Semi-automatic Speaker Identification with Alveolar Fricative Spectra in a Real-world Case (Phil Rose)
- Effects of mobile phone transmission on formant measurements: a large-scale examination based on 306 Japanese male speakers (Yuko Kinoshita and Takashi Osanai)
Some members of FSSC (the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association’s Forensic Speech Science Committee, chaired by Helen) also took the opportunity to have dinner together that evening. We had not been able to meet in person for a very long time, so it was great to have the chance to discuss forensic matters in a more relaxed way.
Moving forward in 2023
We have many plans for the Hub in 2023, and we will mention a few here. The first piece of news for 2023 that we are happy to announce is that we (along with Ute Knoch from the LTRC) were successful in securing a collaboration with Melbourne Data Analytics (MDAP) for 2023. As described on their website, MDAP “are a team of research data and academic specialists enabling data-intensive and collaborative research”. Our project is called Infrastructure and methodology for forensic transcription projects, through which we aim to create better infrastructure for forensic linguistic experiments. Our experiments have very specific needs (for example regarding security of audio, and flexibility of audio players) so it is great that we will be able to work with MDAP to produce software that meets our exact requirements. We also envision that the outcome will be useful for other researchers who use transcripts in their work, so we will be sharing our progress when possible. We are looking forward to our team joining the MDAP group to move forward with the goals of the Hub in 2023.
We are also thrilled to have Eleanor Kettle joining the Hub as PhD student. The broad focus of her project will be transcription of L2 speech. Her supervisory team also includes Dr. Olga Maxwell who has been involved with the Hub previously for an outreach event in 2021 talking about online experiments (see here). Additionally, we have Lauren Harrington, who is a PhD student from The University of York, joining the Hub to work with us during March as a research visitor. Her visit is enabled by an AHRC-funded Doctoral Training Partnership through the The White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. Lauren’s PhD is about the transcription of forensic audio, and for her visit she will be working on a project about priming.
Finally (for now) the Hub are are also planning to host “Hub month” during March! We will have activities on campus at The University of Melbourne during this time (such as talks and masterclasses), and we will communicate more about our plans as soon as they are firmed up.