7 ms·

Jack the Ripper letters written by the same person, forensic linguist concludes

48 points by fern12 9y ago

fnord123 9y ago
Is this the same discipline that thinks Columbus was from Northeastern Spain? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_theories_of_Christopher_Columbus#Catalan_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_theories_of_Christopher... Toilet paper.
- taneq 9y ago
  Andrew Wakefield, the man who published the fraudulent "vaccines cause autism" paper, was a medical researcher. Do we then discount all other medical researchers?
  - fnord123 9y ago
    There are absolutely huge problems in medical research regarding statistical strength and p-hacking. But, I get your point. In this case, copy cats of Jack the Ripper were trying to emulate his (her?) ideolect. So one expects the entire exercise to be hopeless and the conclusion holds no predictive value.
    - msl 9y ago
      > In this case, copy cats of Jack the Ripper were trying to emulate his (her?) ideolect. So one expects the entire exercise to be hopeless and the conclusion holds no predictive value. The letters in question were sent before the first letter was published. How would a copycat know what to emulate before the first letter's publication? It was also found that the latter letters were not very good at copying the original author's style. This is all in the article.
  - chopin 9y ago
    I think medical research should be met with great skepticism even for very reputable members of the medical research community. The GP expresses doubts in the entire field and we for example know now that the majority of past psychological studies are flawed.
  - affinehat 9y ago
    I don't think it's fair to call it the "vaccines cause autism" paper. It didn't suggest a causal relationship. As usual, it was the fault of the media and public for interpreting it in that way.
    - dagw 9y ago
      As usual, it was the fault of the media and public for interpreting it in that way. Absolutely not. The paper was straight up fraudulent, written purely to push an agenda and quite possibly being funded by groups looking sue the vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield spent the rest of his career actively defending and championing the causal relationship way beyond even what his fraudulent evidence might suggest, and it was the media calling bullshit on his so called research that eventually got the paper retracted and him struck off the UK medical register. Look, I love complaining about bad science reporting misrepresenting research as much as the next person, but this is very much not one of those cases.
      - snowpanda 9y ago
        Which paper are we talking about? (Would like to read it).
        fnord123 9y ago
        Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, Linnell J, Casson DM, Malik M, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet. 1998;351:637–41. Recap: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/ In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues[1] published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioral regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.[2] Link to actual paper: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0140673697110960/1-s2.0-S0140673697110960-main.pdf?_tid=3fa9ad18-067f-11e8-ba36-00000aacb35d&acdnat=1517400603_e7f89fc38b5b859ac06fcc95d1844f86 https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0140673697110960/1-s2.0-S01406736971...
- coldtea 9y ago
  Because a discipline making an error in some estimation makes it worth nothing? I wonder were that puts medicine, computer science, engineering and tons of other disciplines that often get it wrong. Not to mention that you haven't given one argument (or reference) why Columbus is not, or could not have been, from Northeastern Spain. So I'd take the "toiler paper" advice with large grains of salt.
  - kolanos 9y ago
    You can't eat your cake and have it, too.
- fnord123 9y ago
  The actual article never claims to have solved anything. So it's actually much better than the published blurbs: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqx065/4824843?guestAccessKey=531a00c9-32f7-464f-81b4-001465e0f65f https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc... """ In this article, an analysis of the texts sent during the Whitechapel murders case was presented. This analysis found linguistic evidence that supports the hypothesis that the two most iconic texts signed as ‘Jack the Ripper’, the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard, have been written by the same person. Because of the number and the distinctiveness of the linguistic similarities, it is likely that an authorial link also exists between these two texts and a third letter sent to the same recipient, the ‘Moab and Midian’ letter. These results constitute new forensic evidence in the Jack the Ripper case after more than 100 years, even though they do not reveal information about the identity of the killer(s). Besides the historical and forensic implications, the results presented in this article also have interesting consequences for modern research in authorship analysis, forensic linguistics, and research on idiolect. The results in this article present additional evidence that uniqueness in linguistic production can be found in the way meaning is encoded and that this encoding of meaning can be difficult to imitate. """ Had the original link made it easier to read the article, I might not have been as hasty to call is toiler paper.
sixhobbits 9y ago
I did my master's thesis on authorship verification, which is exactly this problem (deciding if two texts are written by the same author). I experimented with clustering, SVMs, neural nets, etc for a long time, and got mainly disappointing results. Even when "modern methods" give very high confidence scores, the problem is very messy and complicated, and usually the training data is different enough from the actual data (in supervised learning scenarios) as to bring the result into question. I don't have access to the paper, so can't say much more, but I've seen a lot of very good-looking results that are in fact questionable. Still a fascinating problem!
- garaetjjte 9y ago
  http://sci-hub.la/downloads/7e4c/10.1093@llc@fqx065.pdf http://sci-hub.la/downloads/7e4c/10.1093@llc@fqx065.pdf
- sundarurfriend 9y ago
  From the abstract[1]: > After compiling the ‘Jack the Ripper Corpus’ consisting of the 209 letters linked to the case, a cluster analysis of the letters is carried out using the Jaccard distance of word 2-grams. The quantitative results and the discovery of certain shared distinctive lexicogrammatical structures support the hypothesis that the two most iconic texts responsible for the creation of the persona of Jack the Ripper were written by the same person. So it seems to be a combination of cluster analysis and manual linguistic reading of lexicogrammatical structures. It would be interesting if these studies were done as blind studies, with another letter from the period (or a convincing known fake) was also used as control. Do they find those shared distinctive lexicogrammatical structures in the control too, because they're looking for them now? Does the cluster analysis give significantly higher confidence to grouping the possibly-real letters, compared to grouping one possibly-real letter with the known fake? Those would make this more interesting and less questionable, especially for a first study into this. [1] https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqx065/4824843 https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...

48 points by fern12 9y ago

Is this the same discipline that thinks Columbus was from Northeastern Spain? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_theories_of_Christopher_Columbus#Catalan_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_theories_of_Christopher... Toilet paper.

taneq 9y ago
Andrew Wakefield, the man who published the fraudulent "vaccines cause autism" paper, was a medical researcher. Do we then discount all other medical researchers?
- fnord123 9y ago
  There are absolutely huge problems in medical research regarding statistical strength and p-hacking. But, I get your point. In this case, copy cats of Jack the Ripper were trying to emulate his (her?) ideolect. So one expects the entire exercise to be hopeless and the conclusion holds no predictive value.
  - msl 9y ago
    > In this case, copy cats of Jack the Ripper were trying to emulate his (her?) ideolect. So one expects the entire exercise to be hopeless and the conclusion holds no predictive value. The letters in question were sent before the first letter was published. How would a copycat know what to emulate before the first letter's publication? It was also found that the latter letters were not very good at copying the original author's style. This is all in the article.
- chopin 9y ago
  I think medical research should be met with great skepticism even for very reputable members of the medical research community. The GP expresses doubts in the entire field and we for example know now that the majority of past psychological studies are flawed.
- affinehat 9y ago
  I don't think it's fair to call it the "vaccines cause autism" paper. It didn't suggest a causal relationship. As usual, it was the fault of the media and public for interpreting it in that way.
  - dagw 9y ago
    As usual, it was the fault of the media and public for interpreting it in that way. Absolutely not. The paper was straight up fraudulent, written purely to push an agenda and quite possibly being funded by groups looking sue the vaccine manufacturers. Wakefield spent the rest of his career actively defending and championing the causal relationship way beyond even what his fraudulent evidence might suggest, and it was the media calling bullshit on his so called research that eventually got the paper retracted and him struck off the UK medical register. Look, I love complaining about bad science reporting misrepresenting research as much as the next person, but this is very much not one of those cases.
    - snowpanda 9y ago
      Which paper are we talking about? (Would like to read it).
      - fnord123 9y ago
        Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, Linnell J, Casson DM, Malik M, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet. 1998;351:637–41. Recap: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/ In 1998, Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues[1] published a case series in the Lancet, which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose to behavioral regression and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Despite the small sample size (n=12), the uncontrolled design, and the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper received wide publicity, and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination.[2] Link to actual paper: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0140673697110960/1-s2.0-S0140673697110960-main.pdf?_tid=3fa9ad18-067f-11e8-ba36-00000aacb35d&acdnat=1517400603_e7f89fc38b5b859ac06fcc95d1844f86 https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0140673697110960/1-s2.0-S01406736971...
coldtea 9y ago
Because a discipline making an error in some estimation makes it worth nothing? I wonder were that puts medicine, computer science, engineering and tons of other disciplines that often get it wrong. Not to mention that you haven't given one argument (or reference) why Columbus is not, or could not have been, from Northeastern Spain. So I'd take the "toiler paper" advice with large grains of salt.
- kolanos 9y ago
  You can't eat your cake and have it, too.
fnord123 9y ago
The actual article never claims to have solved anything. So it's actually much better than the published blurbs: https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc/fqx065/4824843?guestAccessKey=531a00c9-32f7-464f-81b4-001465e0f65f https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/llc... """ In this article, an analysis of the texts sent during the Whitechapel murders case was presented. This analysis found linguistic evidence that supports the hypothesis that the two most iconic texts signed as ‘Jack the Ripper’, the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard, have been written by the same person. Because of the number and the distinctiveness of the linguistic similarities, it is likely that an authorial link also exists between these two texts and a third letter sent to the same recipient, the ‘Moab and Midian’ letter. These results constitute new forensic evidence in the Jack the Ripper case after more than 100 years, even though they do not reveal information about the identity of the killer(s). Besides the historical and forensic implications, the results presented in this article also have interesting consequences for modern research in authorship analysis, forensic linguistics, and research on idiolect. The results in this article present additional evidence that uniqueness in linguistic production can be found in the way meaning is encoded and that this encoding of meaning can be difficult to imitate. """ Had the original link made it easier to read the article, I might not have been as hasty to call is toiler paper.

sixhobbits 9y ago

I did my master's thesis on authorship verification, which is exactly this problem (deciding if two texts are written by the same author). I experimented with clustering, SVMs, neural nets, etc for a long time, and got mainly disappointing results. Even when "modern methods" give very high confidence scores, the problem is very messy and complicated, and usually the training data is different enough from the actual data (in supervised learning scenarios) as to bring the result into question. I don't have access to the paper, so can't say much more, but I've seen a lot of very good-looking results that are in fact questionable. Still a fascinating problem!

garaetjjte 9y ago
http://sci-hub.la/downloads/7e4c/10.1093@llc@fqx065.pdf http://sci-hub.la/downloads/7e4c/10.1093@llc@fqx065.pdf
sundarurfriend 9y ago
From the abstract[1]: > After compiling the ‘Jack the Ripper Corpus’ consisting of the 209 letters linked to the case, a cluster analysis of the letters is carried out using the Jaccard distance of word 2-grams. The quantitative results and the discovery of certain shared distinctive lexicogrammatical structures support the hypothesis that the two most iconic texts responsible for the creation of the persona of Jack the Ripper were written by the same person. So it seems to be a combination of cluster analysis and manual linguistic reading of lexicogrammatical structures. It would be interesting if these studies were done as blind studies, with another letter from the period (or a convincing known fake) was also used as control. Do they find those shared distinctive lexicogrammatical structures in the control too, because they're looking for them now? Does the cluster analysis give significantly higher confidence to grouping the possibly-real letters, compared to grouping one possibly-real letter with the known fake? Those would make this more interesting and less questionable, especially for a first study into this. [1] https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqx065/4824843 https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...