ABSTRACT

Different from authorship attribution, i.e. authorship identification, authorship profiling, also referred to as author characterisation, requires somewhat more elaborated investigations to be performed. This article deals with the authorship profiling criteria involving methods for the prediction of the suspect’s gender, age group, profession, native language, location, and demography, personality traits/type, and mental health.

Authorship profiling elements involve the prediction of gender, age group, profession, native language, location, demography, personality traits/type, mental health, educational level, ethnic belonging/ethnicity, cultural level, social status, religious belief, political interests, and cultural values of a suspect through a thorough investigation of the text s/he produced. For these elements, which we refer to as authorship profiling criteria, several methods have been developed involving the analysis of the author’s part of speech usage, the suspected text’s readability features, lexical choice, errors, and topic specific features. The aforementioned criteria are of universal value, that is, can be applied to any language, however, may sometimes vary from language to language and from writing system to writing system, depending on language family and/or typology.

The article specifically deals with the investigation of methods, such as the prediction of gender, age group, profession, native language, location, and demography, personality traits, and mental health, concerning authorship profiling elements. It needs mentioning that for each element the accuracy rate for prediction varies between 60-80%. In order to increase this rate, forensic linguists need to develop new methods, which is dependent on the advances encountered in each subfield of linguistics. As it is considerably difficult to acquire original case material in Turkey, it is inevitable to carry out research with fictional data and corpus.

Keywords: Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Author Profiling.