Forensic analysis of linguistic evidence: Issues and opportunities

2025 CAP Professorial Lecture Series 
This lecture series aims to celebrate our esteemed academics and showcase their areas of expertise in research and teaching.

Agenda 

• 6-7.15pm - Academic Lecture

• 7.15-8pm - Networking drinks and canapés 

Forensic analysis of linguistic evidence: Issues and opportunities

In recent years, mobile communication devices and social networking services (SNS) have been increasingly exploited for criminal purposes due to their high level of anonymity. Among these, 'impersonation' is a common method employed by individuals with malicious intent. In such cases, the speech and text exchanged can provide crucial leads for criminal investigations and legal proceedings, as they contain individuating information. Focusing on textual evidence, the first half of this presentation will outline the speaker's contributions to forensic text comparison, along with an introduction to relevant concepts. The rapid development of generative AI, coupled with the growing internationalisation and multilingual nature of society, has significant implications for the forensic analysis of linguistic evidence. In the second half, the speaker will address these emerging challenges and explore potential opportunities that the AI era presents for this field. The presentation will conclude with a brief overview of prospective research topics that the speaker aims to pursue in the future.

About the speaker 

Shun Ishihara’s research interests lie broadly in speech processing and natural language processing, with a particular focus on forensic voice and text comparison. He is Co-Director of the Speech and Language Laboratory, a joint initiative between ANU College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP) and ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS), and leads the laboratory’s forensic stream. He also serves as Convener of the Forensic Linguistics Program. Shun was the first to apply the approach used in forensic DNA analysis to the source inference problem in linguistic text analysis. He is a member of the Forensic Speech Science Committee of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association. In addition, Shun is an experienced Japanese language instructor with a strong passion for language education.