Dr Andrea Nini

I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. My areas of teaching and research are forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, register variation and cognitive linguistics.
See my university webpage for more information.

LambdaG and grammar as a behavioural biometric

After two long years in pre-print, the paper is finally published! We introduce a new method for authorship verification, LambdaG, which is very simple and yet outperforms or performs as well as complex neural methods. The findings support the theory that a person’s grammar is effectively a behavioural biometric (like…

New pre-print: “Authorship Impersonation via LLM Prompting does not Evade Authorship Verification Methods”

I’m pleased to announce the pre-print of a new article on LLM impersonation, with Baoyi Zeng as first author. The paper shows that current state-of-the-art authorship verification methods tend not to be fooled by an LLM trying to impersonate someone simply using prompting. Several high profile forensic linguistic cases involved…

idiolect: An R package for forensic authorship analysis

My R package for forensic authorship analysis, ‘idiolect’, now has an associated paper published in the Journal of Open Source Software. You can read it here (and use it to cite the package): https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07575. The paper has been released with the new version of idiolect, 1.2.0.

Investigating a Dickens mystery

My latest paper with Hugo Bowles and Claire Wood examines a Dickens mystery: did he author the recently decoded story “The Two Brothers”? The answer is complicated. The paper showcases our new method, LambdaG (forthcoming!). The paper can be found here or the free accepted version is here.

Assessing the suitability of forensic authorship analysis methodologies for speech data

On Monday Dr James Tompkinson (University of York) and I presented our talk on “Assessing the suitability of forensic authorship analysis methodologies for speech data” at the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) 2025 conference at Leiden University (The Hague), where we show some preliminary results about applying…