Carole Chaski

Carole Elisabeth Chaski (born 1955) is a forensic linguist, considered one of the leading experts in the field, especially in the field of author identification research. She is also the president of ALIAS Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence.

Chaski earned her A.B. magna cum laude in English and Ancient Greek from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, M.Ed. in Psychology of Reading from the University of Delaware in 1981, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Brown University in 1987. In 2009 she helped to establish the Association for Linguistic Evidence, an organization devoted to making forensic linguistics "a true forensic science, compliant with both legal admissibility standards and linguistic theory."

Chaski is known for her research on the "keyboard dilemma," defined as "the problem of identifying the authorship of a document that was produced by a computer to which multiple users had access." Chaski's solution to this dilemma involves the application of a cross-validated syntactic analysis methodology.

While teaching linguistics at North Carolina State University (1990–1994), Chaski was contacted by Detective W. Allison Blackman of the Raleigh Major Crimes Unit regarding the authorship of suicide notes left on a home computer. Using syntactic and statistical analysis, she was able to show that the decedent had not authored the suicide notes, and that one roommate was a likely author. During the trial of North Carolina v Joseph Mannino for the murder of Michael Hunter, Mr. Mannino confessed on the witness stand that he had authored the suicide notes.

As a result of this and other cases, Chaski sought and won a Visiting Research Fellowship (1995–1998) at the US Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, Office of Science and Technology, Investigative and Forensic Sciences Division, where she began the validation testing which has become an increasingly important aspect of forensic sciences since the Daubert ruling. Chaski has served as an expert witness in federal and state Courts in the United States, in Canada and in The Hague.

Her clients include major law firms, major corporate human resources, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, defense attorneys, plaintiff attorneys, security consultants and private individuals working with attorneys and police detectives. Chaski developed—and continues to develop—ALIAS: Automated Linguistic Identification and Assessment System in order to provide objective measurements for statistical analysis. She has provided testimony using ALIAS, without any restrictions on her ability to state conclusions, after Daubert and Frye hearings in federal and state courts.

Chaski currently serves on the editorial board of Brief Chronicles, a peer reviewed journal of Shakespearean authorship studies.

• Who Wrote It? Steps Toward a Science of Author Identification. National Institute of Justice Journal, vol. 233, pp. 15–22 (1997).
• "Junk Science, Pre-Science and Developing Science" National Conference on Science and the Law Proceedings, 97-147 (1999).
• "Empirical Evaluations of Language-Based Author Identification Techniques" International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 8:1 (2001).
• "Who’s At The Keyboard? Recent Results in Authorship Attribution," International Journal of Digital Evidence 4:1 (Spring 2005), 1-13 (2005).
• "The Keyboard Dilemma and Authorship Attribution," International Federation for Information Processing Volume 242, 133-146 (2007).