Just read about an interesting study aluded to by the BBC on the semantic analysis of textual messages between mobile phone users.

The individual styles of hundreds of people’s text messages will be analysed in a study that aims to help police with criminal investigations.

Researchers will scrutinise volunteers’ SMS messages to tease out patterns in the language and style of texts.

The University of Leicester team hopes the work will yield tools that allow identification of a text author.

What researchers are finding - that what people leave out of their instant text messages is as important as what they put in - as what they leave out is fairly consistant.

The study found, so far, that “There seems to be systematic variation in the words people leave out of text messages, particularly if you use predictive text messaging,” he said. Others will leave determiners out, and will write “went to shop”. “The different parts of speech that people leave out seem to be fairly consistent, but the purpose of the study is to find out if that is actually true,” said Dr Grant.

“You won’t leave letters out, but to be quicker in the texting you will leave words out.”

For some people this will be pronouns, so they will write “went to the shop” rather than “I went to the shop”.

Volunteers needed

The new study aims to build on this kind of analysis to develop a forensic toolkit for investigations involving texts.

The six month study will analyse the linguistic conventions of texters.

The different parts of speech that people leave out seem to be fairly consistent Dr Grant, University of Leicester

Forensic authorship analysis, as the technique is known, is already used extensively for written documents like letters and e-mails.

It is often used to analyse abusive or threatening e-mails or in cases of copyright infringement. It has not been widely used to study text messages.

“As texting is both a relatively new mode of communication and a particularly informal way of using language, there is not a strong expectation that texters will follow linguistic conventions,” said Dr Tim Grant, one of the team behind the study.

“This freedom therefore allows for significant individual differences in text messaging style, and this can be used to identify the text’s authors.”

And the last part tells us that as people within a IM group interact with each other - they begin to adopt similar slang language and become more “SmartMobby” in their actions.

The team also hope to identify patterns that give clues to the age and gender of the author.

The team are now looking for at least 100 volunteers who are willing to hand over 10 messages for analysis. They are particularly interested in groups of people who text each other.

“In all languages we know that groups tend to start sounding like one another, said Dr Grant. “Text messaging is likely to be a microcosm of these more general linguistic features.”

The study will be conducted anonymously.

Links: BBC, MoneyControl