Reading Between the Lines: Human-centred Classification of Communication Patterns and Intentions

Abstract

Author identification will benefit from the deeper understanding of human’s approach to infer the intention of an author by some kind of text-content analysis, informal speaking by “read between the lines”. This so-called qualitative text analysis aims to derive purpose, context and tone of a communication. By determining characteristics of text that serve as information carrier for communication intents as well as possible interpretations of those information it is assumed to be feasible to develop advanced computer-based methods. So far, however, only few studies on the information carrier and communication intends are performed. In addition, there is no public benchmark dataset available that can support the development and testing of computational methods.

After giving an overview of the current state of art in research and forensic author identification, this paper details a case study on the identification of text-based characteristics and their linkage to specific individuals or target groups by using indicator patterns of human communication and behaviour. Communication patterns determined in this pilot study can be adopted in several other communication contexts and target groups. Moreover, these pattern found will support further research and development of computational methods for qualitative text analysis and the identification of authors.