Explainability of machine learning approaches in forensic linguistics: a case study in geolinguistic authorship profiling

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Main Authors: Roemling, Dana, Scherrer, Yves, Miletic, Aleksandra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Roemling, Dana
Scherrer, Yves
Miletic, Aleksandra
author_facet Roemling, Dana
Scherrer, Yves
Miletic, Aleksandra
contents Forensic authorship profiling uses linguistic markers to infer characteristics about an author of a text. This task is paralleled in dialect classification, where a prediction is made about the linguistic variety of a text based on the text itself. While there have been significant advances in recent years in variety classification, forensic linguistics rarely relies on these approaches due to their lack of transparency, among other reasons. In this paper we therefore explore the explainability of machine learning approaches considering the forensic context. We focus on variety classification as a means of geolinguistic profiling of unknown texts based on social media data from the German-speaking area. For this, we identify the lexical items that are the most impactful for the variety classification. We find that the extracted lexical features are indeed representative of their respective varieties and note that the trained models also rely on place names for classifications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_18510
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explainability of machine learning approaches in forensic linguistics: a case study in geolinguistic authorship profiling
Roemling, Dana
Scherrer, Yves
Miletic, Aleksandra
Computation and Language
Forensic authorship profiling uses linguistic markers to infer characteristics about an author of a text. This task is paralleled in dialect classification, where a prediction is made about the linguistic variety of a text based on the text itself. While there have been significant advances in recent years in variety classification, forensic linguistics rarely relies on these approaches due to their lack of transparency, among other reasons. In this paper we therefore explore the explainability of machine learning approaches considering the forensic context. We focus on variety classification as a means of geolinguistic profiling of unknown texts based on social media data from the German-speaking area. For this, we identify the lexical items that are the most impactful for the variety classification. We find that the extracted lexical features are indeed representative of their respective varieties and note that the trained models also rely on place names for classifications.
title Explainability of machine learning approaches in forensic linguistics: a case study in geolinguistic authorship profiling
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18510