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.
Large Language Models and Forensic Linguistics: Challenges and opportunities
The video of my keynote at the 4th International Conference “AI-generated Texts in Romance and Germanic Language Varieties” (AI-ROM-IV), hosted by Technische Universität Dresden on 22 September 2026, is now on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kVTVtmNf9Yg?si=0mdLAESjlIKw9vo1
Read moreMy Latest Jack the Ripper Interviews on YouTube & Podcasts
In the last month I was interviewed for two documentaries/podcasts on Jack the Ripper: The Growth Time Machine podcast, which you can find here and a full one hour (excellent!) documentary from the channel Today I Learned Science, which is here.
Read moreOur Lab’s contributions to IAFLL 2026 in Montpellier
Our lab presented five papers at the last European conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics in June in Montpellier. Here are some pictures as well as links to see the abstracts and slides of the talks: https://manling.wordpress.com/2026/07/15/the-forensic-language-analysis-lab-in-montpellier-for-iafll26/.
Read moreLambdaG: A simplified approach to Authorship Verification
In our latest research, led by Sadie Barlow and with Dr Edoardo Manino, we discovered a very important property of LambdaG: it does not require a calibration dataset to produce well calibrated likelihood ratios. A simple correction is sufficient. This means that the analysis is significantly simpler to implement and…
Read moreLambdaG 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…
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