Carole E. Chaski, PhD is the CEO and President of ALIAS Technology LLC, which she founded in 2007. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, the first non-profit research organization devoted to research and development in linguistic evidence, which she founded in 1998. Chaski began work in forensic linguistics in 1992 and is credited with pioneering the field of forensic computational linguistics. She has developed methods and software for authorship identification and classification of specific discourse types, such as threat letters, suicide notes, child sex-abuse allegations, predatory chats, and deceptive witness statements.
She has presented her research at universities such as Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Brown, Northwestern, Chicago, Michigan, Mary Washington, Duquesne, Bonn (Germany), Chungbuk National University (Korea), National Police University of China (China), and at conferences such as the Linguistic Society of America, the American Academy of Forensic Science, Law and Society Association, the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, the International Classification Society, IEEE Homeland Security, TALE: The Association for Linguistic Evidence, and a meeting of law firms in Greece. She has published over 50 abstracts, articles and book chapters in forensic linguistics.
Chaski held a Visiting Research Fellowship (1995-1998) at the US Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Chaski was the first person to receive Federal funding for forensic linguistic research in the USA, and she has subsequently helped other researchers win funding. During her fellowship, Chaski developed the first linguistic corpus designed for research in forensic linguistics and conducted the first empirical testing for popular linguistic methods of determining authorship of forensic texts. Chaski has served as an expert witness for cases in Federal and State Courts in the United States, in Canada and in The Hague; she has provided unrestricted testimony on linguistic issues in Federal and State courts in the USA after Daubert and Frye hearings. She was the first linguist in the United States to successfully undergo a Daubert hearing for the admissibility of authorship identification evidence based on computational linguistics. She is also the first linguist in the United States to successfully be admitted under a Frye hearing for the admissibility of evidence based on the linguistic capacity method for authorship identification and the text-typing method for discourse type identification.
Chaski earned her doctorate and master’s in linguistics (syntax, language variation and computational linguistics) at Brown University, her master’s in psychology of reading (psycholinguistics) at the University of Delaware and her bachelor’s in English and Ancient Greek from Bryn Mawr College.
Chaski is a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Science, Engineering Sciences Section, a Lifetime member of the Linguistic Society of America, a member of the Societas Linguistisca Europaea, a Founding member of TALE: The Association for Linguistic Evidence, an Associate member of the American Bar Association, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE and ASIS.
At ALIAS Technology, Chaski is responsible for the overall vision of the company, the administration of casework in case consulting, linguistic analysis in case consulting, and development, design and coding of software provided by ALIAS Technology.
Melissa Wright MA is the Administrative Associate at ALIAS Technology LLC, which she joined in 2017. Wright has a background in journalism, digital marketing, website development, and computational syntactic linguistics, all of which are put to good use in her work at ALIAS Technology.
Wright earned her master’s in linguistics from Northern Illinois University in 2017. While there, she completed a year-long master’s thesis research project differentiating the character dialogue from the narration of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray using computational syntactic methodology. In 2018, her work was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award in the category of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, and she was the university’s representative for the 2018 Midwestern Association of Graduate School regional thesis competition.
Since graduating, Ms Wright has worked in the digital marketing realm, as a linguistic consultant for a company that performs discourse analysis of doctor-patient conversations, and for a company providing resources targeted toward linguistics majors. She and her psychotherapist husband are developing a communication research, analysis, and consulting platform for those who want to improve their communication styles within their relationships.
At ALIAS Technology, Wright coordinates activity between ALIAS Technology LLC and its partners. At the Institute for Linguistic Evidence (ILE), Wright is the Managing Director and Assistant Director of Research. Through ILE, she manages the professional association TALE: The Association for Linguistic Evidence as the Membership Coordinator. Finally, Wright is the Managing Editor of LESLI: Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence. Wright also provides linguistic analysis in case consulting as a support linguist.
Accounting services for ALIAS Technology LLC are provided by S. Thomas Sombar, CPA of Sombar & Company CPAs, P.A. in Georgetown, Delaware.
Legal services for ALIAS Technology LLC are provided by Jim Lennon, Esq of The Devlin Group in Wilmington, Delaware.