Anonymity and Imitation in Linguistic Identity Disguise

Authorship attribution can be highly accurate, but most techniques are based on the assumption that authors have not attempted to disguise their writing style. Research has found that when writers had deliberately altered their style, commonly used authorship analysis techniques only performed at the level of random chance. This is problematic because many forensic authorship cases investigate documents where it is believed that an author has tried to impersonate somebody else for criminal purposes, and has attempted to adapt their writing style to do so. This study uses a corpus of scripts from the BBC drama, The Archers, to explore how authors write different characters’ voices. Scriptwriters need to adapt their writing style to create the different characters’ dialogues, and this fictional identity disguise is used as a proxy to examine authorship analysis techniques in forensic linguistics. The thesis begins with a literature review exploring the nature of linguistic identity and literary characterisation. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of using fictional data to address forensic problems. There are three main studies: firstly, a quantitative analysis comparing inter-author consistency and variation of authorship analysis features; the second study is a qualitative, stylistic analysis of characterisation, exploring lexical choice, use of dialect, and (im)politeness strategies. The third study is a corpus analysis of the different pragmatic functions of shared lexical tokens. The studies showed that as writers adapted their linguistic style to create different characters, results for commonly-used attribution techniques were observably affected. Some linguistic identities were more distinctive than others, and some authors were more clearly identifiable than others. At a pragmatic level, authors showed more inter-character consistency, and a reduced ability to anonymise their own linguistic traits. This reinforces the importance of investigating linguistic identity disguise at higher levels of language analysis, in addition to lower-level, structural features

The early proximal αβ TCR signalosome specifies thymic selection outcome through a quantitative protein interaction network

During αβ T cell development, T cell antigen receptor (TCR) engagement transduces biochemical signals through a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network that dictates dichotomous cell fate decisions. It remains unclear how signal specificity is communicated, instructing either positive selection to advance cell differentiation or death by negative selection. Early signal discrimination might occur by PPI signatures differing qualitatively (customized, unique PPI combinations for each signal), quantitatively (graded amounts of a single PPI series), or kinetically (speed of PPI pathway progression). Using a novel PPI network analysis, we found that early TCR-proximal signals distinguishing positive from negative selection appeared to be primarily quantitative in nature. Furthermore, the signal intensity of this PPI network was used to find an antigen dose that caused a classic negative selection ligand to induce positive selection of conventional αβ T cells, suggesting that the quantity of TCR triggering was sufficient to program selection outcome. Because previous work had suggested that positive selection might involve a qualitatively unique signal through CD3δ, we reexamined the block in positive selection observed in CD3δ0 mice. We found that CD3δ0 thymocytes were inhibited but capable of signaling positive selection, generating low numbers of MHC-dependent αβ T cells that expressed diverse TCR repertoires and participated in immune responses against infection. We conclude that the major role for CD3δ in positive selection is to quantitatively boost the signal for maximal generation of αβ T cells. Together, these data indicate that a quantitative network signaling mechanism through the early proximal TCR signalosome determines thymic selection outcome

Progress Junction, by Sneaky Feelings

CD of original musical compositions by band of which I am a major composer and performe