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CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW

SPECIAL ISSUE: Computational Forensic Linguistics: Law, Language and Evidence in the Virtual Worlds

Volume 39 (2026)

Guest Editor – Rui Sousa-Silva (University of Porto – Faculty of Arts and Humanities & Centre for Linguistics of the University of Porto)

Forensic linguistics, the branch of linguistics applied to forensic contexts, is inherently multidisciplinary, although it predominantly stands at the intersection of language and the law. Despite its status as a young discipline, forensic linguistics is wide in scope, and has significantly contributed to a fair and just administration of Justice, especially since the late 1990s, across its three different areas: the written language of the law, interaction in legal contexts, and language as evidence (May, Sousa-Silva & Coulthard, ‘Introduction’, The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, Routledge, 2021). The discipline is thus profoundly semiotic in nature, and has a significant impact on how law is interpreted and administered, and on how investigative processes are conducted. However, as a young discipline, it still faces methodological and technical challenges. Forensic linguistics is often questioned as a science, for instance owing to the fact that forensic linguists can hardly, if ever, establish the known error rate, which is often demanded to meet the legal requirements (e.g., Daubert criteria) in some jurisdictions. It is also frequently distrusted as a science, and particularly as a forensic science, on the grounds that it is subjective. Furthermore, the perception that anyone – and hence legal professionals, including judges and counsellors – can “understand” the semiotics of language use and analyse language has often led the courts into believing that forensic linguists are dispensable. To counter these misconceptions about the field, forensic linguists have constantly researched and devised new methods, including statistical and computational approaches, to counter the “subjectivity effect”. Computational approaches, specifically, will play a core role in forensic linguistics: they not only allow forensic linguists to analyse large amounts of data quickly and systematically, but also enable the reproducibility of the forensic linguistic analysis, which can be essential in forensic sciences. This will be especially the case in the near future, with progress in the metaverse, as the seamless interaction between users via technology-mediated communication in the virtual worlds will raise even more issues that can only be resolved with the assistance of rigorous and transparent forensic linguistic analyses. Computational forensic linguistics, thus understood as the use of efficient and effective computational linguistics tools, methods and techniques in forensic contexts, will thus play an increasingly core role in forensic linguistics across the areas of written language of the law, interaction in legal contexts and, especially, language as evidence. Original proposals that explore the relationship between the semiotics of law and one or more computational approaches to forensic linguistics are thus invited for the special issue “Computational Forensic Linguistics: Law, Language, Evidence and Rigour in the Virtual Worlds”. Submissions may range from (but not limited to) systems to help the courts interpret and draft just and fair decisions to software and tools to assist law enforcement agencies in the fight against crime, including platforms to support the investigation in the collection and analysis of evidence. Manuscripts should establish a clear connection between the semiotics of law, computational approaches and forensic linguistics/language and the law.

Submissions should be addressed to: Rui Sousa-Silva (rssilva@letras.up.pt).

- Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) by 15 May 2025. - After selection, final papers (15,000 words maximum, including endnotes and references) should be submitted by 15 November 2025.

Further information: https://link.springer.com/collections/ebcefecdcf

Rui Sousa Silva

Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto

www.linguisticaforense.pt | https://s.up.pt/qjur | http://tinyurl.com/37w2ec6x Publicação mais recente / Latest publication: ‘We Attempted to Deliver Your Package’: Forensic Translation in the Fight Against Cross-Border Cybercrime

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