Welcome to Institute for Linguistic Evidence Inc.
Institute for Linguistic Evidence - Mission & Philosophy
In some criminal, civil, and security matters, language can be evidence. A suicide note, a threatening letter, anonymous communications, business emails, blog posts, trademarks --all of these can help investigators, attorneys, human resource executives and private individuals understand the heart of an incident. When you are faced with a suspicious document, whether you need to know who wrote it, or if it is a real threat or a real suicide note, or if it is too close for comfort to some other document, you need reliable, validated methods. ILE researches the development and use of forensically-feasible computational tools for handling language as evidence.
For consulting services and help in forensic linguistics, visit our sister organization ALIAS Technology LLC.
Our Mission
- To research and develop proven and reliable methods for answering forensically significant questions about language
- To develop methods based in linguistic theory and computational linguistics
- To educate the public and legal systems about the proper use of language as evidence and the danger of using methods not based on linguistics
Our Philosophy
- Integrity is the foundation for joy and peace. We do not risk our integrity.
- We readily admit the limitations, as well as the robustness, of reliable scientific methods under specific conditions. We do not try to make something work when it doesn't.
- We seek to develop, through continuous research, analytical methods which will perform robustly on forensic data. We persist.
- We do not over-state or over-generalize the robustness of the analytical methods we perform.We readily admit the limitations of data in forensic settings.