As I learned from researching the piece for the Times, the field of forensic linguistics is a contentious one, especially when it comes to matters of authorship attribution. It’s one thing when a scholar is trying to determine who wrote a literary work — for instance, when the English professor Donald Foster correctly identified Joe Klein as the author of the political novel Primary Colors, despite Klein’s protests to the contrary. Even with a long text, like a play that may or may not have been written by Shakespeare, there can be vehement debates among scholars. Now imagine trying to determine the author of a handful of e-mails or text messages.
The expert report filed on behalf of Zuckerberg came to the conclusion that he probably didn't write the e-mails that Ceglia said he did, but the evidence was seen as rather skimpy by the forensic linguists I talked to. (For further details, see this discussion by Mark Liberman on Language Log, especially the comments made on the post by Ron Butters, Larry Solan, and Carole Chaski, all experts in the field.) A handful of style markers were claimed to reveal an authorial difference between the e-mails in question (Ceglia quoted 35 of them in his amended complaint) and actual Zuckerberg e-mails from the time. These markers included variations in spelling (cannot vs. can not), capitalization (Internet vs. internet), punctuation (“...” vs. “. . .”), and syntax (run-on sentences vs. sentences with separating punctuation). The expert, Gerald McMenamin, found that 9 of the 11 style markers that he analyzed showed differences and two showed similarities, which he saw as strong enough evidence to conclude that Zuckerberg was not the author of the questioned e-mails. But others have argued that the sample size was simply too small to draw meaningful conclusions, and that the style markers were not systematically measured.
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