EML Research gGmbH

Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33

69118 Heidelberg

Germany

Tel.: +49 (0)6221 - 533 - 238

Fax: +49 (0)6221 - 533 - 298

My PhD is about deception detection, that is, to find deception in spoken text. This work is part of the JUMAS project - a European project funded by the ICT programme within the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development activities of the European Commisson. It aims to build an infrastructure to collect, manage and enrich multimedia documents. Its prototype is developed on judicial data.

The goal of my PhD research is to find indicators for deception, i.e. linguistic, auditory and visual attributes that appear or change when a person lies or attempts to deceive. My work is based on three assumptions: a) the liar is afraid of detection (due to moral or even legal reasons), b) telling from memory is a cognitively different task than telling from imagination, and c) both, assumption a) and b) have an impact on the liar's speech behaviour. Many previous approaches on deception detection have had the one common problem of data acquisition. Catching a liar is a difficult task; humans are bad deception detectors and the artificial creation of lies does not guarantee the aspect of stress. If participants are instructed to lie in a corpus study, it gives them moral and legal justification to do so. Our data, however, consists of real trial recordings and is thus highly adequate for the study of deception detection.

Other topics I am interested in are subjectivity detection and sentiment analysis, as well as formal semantics in general.