Hello. I am Michael Oakes, and I have been a Reader in the Research Group in Computational Linguistics for about a year and a half. Previously I spent 13 years at the University of Sunderland, teaching computing in general, so now it feels exciting to be in a group dedicated specifically to Natural Language Processing. After starting here, I took a few more months to finish my book “Literary Detective Work on the Computer”. The book started way back in 2008, when Prof. Mitkov suggested that I write a book for the book series he edits for the John Benjamins Publishing Company. The book was to be centred around computational stylometry, the computer analysis of writing style. He suggested that studies of disputed authorship, plagiarism and spam (unwarranted email campaigns) should considered together, partly because they often uncover fraudulent behaviour, but also because they all consider the question of where a text originally came from, and how similar one text is to another. Continue reading →