Dr Emily Chiang
Postdoctoral Research Associate Aston University
- Birmingham
Dr Chiang's research focuses on linguistic expressions of identity in online criminal contexts.
Media
Social
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Education
Aston University
PhD
Rhetorical moves and identity performance in online child sexual abuse interactions
2018
Aston University
MA
Forensic Linguistics
2015
Oxford Brookes University
BA
English Language and Linguistics & Education and Human Development
2009
Media Appearances
Crimewatch Live | Series 18 | Episode 8 of 15
BBC tv
2023-10-11
The fast-paced investigation into how an Essex teen who plotted a terror attack against police and soldiers was caught and sentenced to six years for his menacing plans.
A quarter of young people trust scam messages
Financial Times online
2022-04-22
The report by Visa and Aston University’s Institute for Forensic Linguistics into the language of fraud also found that a quarter of 18-34-year-old respondents said they would not check for spelling and grammar mistakes, raising questions about their ability to detect fraud.
Body of evidence: meet the experts working in crime scene forensics
The Guardian online
2021-12-12
‘There was an offender on the dark web who was partially identified because he regularly used the unusual greeting “hiyas”’: Emily Chiang, forensic linguistics.
Researcher helps police track paedophiles on the dark web
Jersey Evening Post online
2020-03-05
Ex-Les Quennevais and Hautlieu pupil Emily Chiang spent three years on her PHD research that looked into three aspects of language used within paedophile groups on the dark web.
The Linguist Who Helps Police Catch Child Predators
The Atlantic online
2018-07-10
In one 2017 paper, co-written with his colleague Emily Chiang, Grant identifies 14 “rhetorical moves used in chatroom grooming” and unpacks “the broad structures that grooming conversations take,” based on transcripts of real child grooming collated by Perverted Justice. The most common approach groomers take, he finds, is that they build a connection before introducing any sort of sexual component. And they try hard to keep the conversation going, sexual or not. One of the biggest tells is what Grant calls the “mitigating lol”—a way of downplaying a serious sexual request, such as “u should make a nude vid and send it to me,” by adding the word “lol” at the end. “[Its] use here implies something vaguely playful or unserious about these contributions,” Grant and Chiang write. Most offenders introduce sexual overtones early in a conversation, they find.
Online paedophile tactics exposed in forensic linguistic study
Phys.org online
2018-04-24
Emily Chiang, a Ph.D. candidate at Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics and lead author of the study, said: "This study looks at online instant messaging conversations between a convicted child sex offender and several of his victims. The offender adopted several different identities with different characteristics – some would be male, some female, one worked for a modelling agency – and I wanted to compare each of these in terms of linguistic moves."
Online paedophile tactics exposed in forensic linguistic study
Aston University News online
2018-04-24
Emily Chiang, a PhD candidate at Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics and lead author of the study, said: “This study looks at online instant messaging conversations between a convicted child sex offender and several of his victims. The offender adopted several different identities with different characteristics – some would be male, some female, one worked for a modelling agency – and I wanted to compare each of these in terms of linguistic moves.”
Research Grants
Analysing and Describing Online Behaviours around Escalation (ADOBE)
Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant
2025
Ensuring Safer Justice Outcomes in Online, Including Undercover, Child Sexual Abuse Investigations (SALVUS)
Horizon Project
2025
Lead researcher on LEADS-Engine: Linguistically Enabled Analytic Dark Search Engine
Innovate UK
September 2022 – August 2023
With Krzysztof Kredens (PI) at Aston University and Forensic Pathways Ltd.
Lead researcher on LASO: Linguistic Analysis of Sex Offender Interactions on Dark Web Forums
Alan Turing Institute Defence and Security Program
October 2018 – June 2019
With Jack Grieve (PI) at the University of Birmingham and Dong Ngyen at Alan Turing Institute.
Articles
Fighting fraud: Corpus-assisted approaches to understanding and disrupting fraud activity on the dark web
Applied Corpus Linguistics2025
Financial fraud has risen steeply over the last decade and, according to data from the National Crime Agency, is currently recognised as the most commonly experienced crime in the UK, accounting for over 40 % of all crimes in England and Wales committed against individuals over 16. Much of this increase is attributed to the rise and evolution of online technologies which have ushered in a wave of new methods and opportunities for perpetrators as well as an era of unprecedented personal self-disclosure via social media by potential victims whose details can be readily exploited.
Linguistic mechanisms of knowledge-exchange in a dark-web money laundering forum
PLoS One2025
Money laundering facilitates serious crime, enables the expansion of criminal operations, and destabilises economies. Extant scholarship is largely concerned with anti-money laundering approaches, with far less attention being paid to the language and behaviours of the individuals who engage in money laundering. ‘Dark-web’ discussion fora are prime loci for illicit knowledge exchange and key enablers of money laundering, yet, are underexplored as sites for understanding the online activities and behaviours of users. This paper reports on a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of one such forum, guided by research questions around the key topics and common linguistic strategies by which knowledge is exchanged within a large community of individuals interested in money laundering, and the ways in which this community serves its members. The analysis identifies the forum as an extremely efficient and productive site for knowledge-exchange and thus ‘criminal upskilling’, which is attributed to three core characteristics: a strict adherence to community rules, a highly knowledgeable user base, and a culture of friendliness and reciprocity.
Linguistic Analysis of Online Criminal Communications
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics2025
The linguistic analysis of online criminal communications is an emerging area of interest in forensic linguistics. In this article, we examine the use of methods and approaches from corpus and sociolinguistics in research on the most prominent subdomains of online criminality, including online child sexual exploitation and abuse, extremism and terrorism, and the manosphere, among other emerging topics such as drugs markets and online sex fora. We highlight the distinction between perpetrator–victim communications and perpetrator in-group communications and identify internet-based criminal and harmful communities of practice as prime loci for the production of online criminal communications through online fora. Such online fora discussions, when harvested for linguistic research, become key sites of linguistic practice and behavior providing insights into the mechanics of internet-facilitated criminal activity.
“This is an extortion note”: A rhetorical move-analysis of discourse structure and genre in commercial extortion letters
Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito2024
The paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of a series of 39 commercial extortion letters and emails from historic cases in the UK (2008-19), called the Excrow corpus (Extortion CoRpus Of Writings).
Using Swales’ (1990) Move Analysis, we explore whether conventional discourse structures of a genre (i.e., moves) can be identified in extortion letters. We then analyse the identified moves with corpus linguistics and clustering algorithms.
Identity in a Self-styled ‘Paedophile-hunting’ Group: A Linguistic Analysis of Stance in Facebook Group Chats
Applied Linquistics2024
This article contributes a linguistically informed perspective to a growing body of work describing the nature and practices of self-styled ‘paedophile-hunting’ groups. Their reliance on publicly exposing suspected child predators in live-streamed confrontations poses significant moral and practical challenges for UK law enforcement, even if their evidence has proved significant in the conviction of sex offenders. In this article, we extend extant insight through the linguistic analysis of 18 months of private online group chat data from one of the UK’s most prolific hunting teams. Specifically, we explore the group’s collective linguistic identity performance through a corpus-assisted analysis of stance. Our analysis foregrounds the significance of social bonding and community identity and nuances current understanding of hunters’ negative view of the police. It also suggests that the entertainment value of the detective work involved in hunting may be more significant than the emphasis on hunters’ self-proclaimed moral superiority in extant work suggests.
“I read the rules and know what is expected of me”: The performance of competence and expertise in ‘newbie’ offenders’ membership requests to dark web child abuse communities
Discourse, Context & Media2024
Community-building among groups of child abusers on the ‘dark web’ facilitates the large-scale distribution of indecent imagery and supports individuals in becoming more skilled, more dangerous offenders. Undercover police are tasked with posing as offenders to gather intelligence; however, we know little about the nature of these groups, and especially how one might approach them linguistically as an ‘authentically’ interested outsider. This study analyses rhetorical moves (Swales, 1990) in forum posts from child abuse-related dark web fora by self-identifying ‘newbies’ hoping to join established abuse communities. It identifies 12 distinct moves used in the pursuit to join online abuse communities and finds that expressions of competence and expertise are central to newbies’ attempts to gain community membership. ‘De-lurking’ is identified as a useful strategy in the performance of competence in online forums. These findings can support online undercover policing tasks as well as offender prioritisation.
Linguistic analysis of suspected child sexual offenders’ interactions in a dark web image exchange chatroom
The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law2021
Child sexual offenders convene in dark web spaces to exchange indecent imagery, advice and support. In response, law enforcement agencies deploy undercover agents to pose as offenders online to gather intelligence on these offending communities. Currently, however, little is known about how offenders interact online, which raises significant questions around how undercover officers should ‘authentically’ portray the persona of a child sexual offender. This article presents the first linguistic description of authentic offender–offender interactions taking place on a dark web image exchange chatroom. Using move analysis, we analyse chatroom users’ rhetorical strategies. We then model the move sequences of different users and user types using Markov chains, to make comparisons between their linguistic behaviours. We find the predominant moves characterising this chatroom are Offering Indecent Images, Greetings, Image Appreciation, General Rapport and Image Discussion, and that rhetorical strategies differ between users of different levels of offending and dark web image-sharing experience.
‘Send Me Some Pics’: Performing the Offender Identity in Online Undercover Child Abuse Investigations Get access Arrow
Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice2020
This article presents a case study examining the performance of the offender identity in online child sexual abuse interactions between genuine suspected offenders and an undercover officer posing as an offender. Using a linguistic framework known as move analysis, the study describes and compares interactants' use of rhetorical moves, as well as move frequencies and structures. Similarities and differences in the performance of offenderness between suspected offenders and the undercover police officer are discussed. Interactions are characterised by a high level of rapport-building, sharing stories, and exchanging support. While the undercover officer largely emulates the moves of suspected offenders, key discrepancies include his comparative reluctance to engage in abuse-related story-telling and an increased tendency to inquire about abusive images. This work highlights possible target areas for police training in the task of online identity assumption in online child abuse cases.
Attributing the Bixby Letter using n-gram tracing
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities2018
There is a long-standing debate about the authorship of the Bixby Letter, one of the most famous pieces of correspondence in American history. Despite being signed by President Abraham Lincoln, some historians have claimed that its true author was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretary. Analyses of the letter have been inconclusive in part because the text totals only 139 words and is thus far too short to be attributed using standard methods. To test whether Lincoln or Hay wrote this letter, we therefore introduce and apply a new technique for attributing short texts called ‘n-gram tracing’. After demonstrating that our method can distinguish between the known writings of Lincoln and Hay with a very high degree of accuracy, we use it to attribute the Bixby Letter. We conclude that the text was authored by John Hay—rewriting this one episode in the history of the USA, while offering a solution to one of the most persistent problems in authorship attribution.
Do Perverted Justice chat logs contain examples of Overt Persuasion and Sexual Extortion? A Research Note responding to Chiang and Grant (2017, 2018)
Language and Law Linguagem e Direito2018
Studies by Chiang and Grant (2017, 2018) on the rhetorical moves of online child sexual abusers suggest that interactions between offenders and adults posing as children differ in various ways from those between offenders and genuine child victims. They point specifically to the use by one offender of moves identified as Overt persuasion and Extortion in his interactions with real children noting that these were absent from data featuring adults posing as children. The current study investigates whether these more coercive and forceful moves are in fact absent in sexualised interactions between offenders and adult decoys by applying corpus linguistic techniques to a corpus of 622 chat logs. It is shown that overtly persuasive language is rare in the texts, and that no extortion occurred. This finding supports Chiang and Grant’s claim and their assertion that data featuring adult decoys is not truly representative of interactions between child victims and their abusers.
Deceptive Identity Performance: Offender Moves and Multiple Identities in Online Child Abuse Conversations
Applied Linguistics2018
This article provides a case study of deceptive online identity performance by a convicted child sex offender. Most prior linguistic and psychological research into online sexual abuse analyses transcripts involving adult decoys posing as children. In contrast, our data comprise genuine online conversations between the offender and 20 victims. Using move analysis (Swales 1981, 1990), we explore the offender’s numerous presented personas. The offender’s use of rhetorical moves is investigated, as is the extent to which the frequency and structure of these moves contribute to and discriminate between the various online personas he adopts. We find from eight frequently adopted personas that two divergent identity positions emerge: the sexual pursuer/aggressor, performed by the majority of his online personas, and the friend/boyfriend, performed by a single persona. Analysis of the offender’s self-describing assertives suggests this distinctive persona shares most attributes with the offender’s ‘home identity’. This article importantly raises the question of whether move analysis might be useful in identifying the ‘offline persona’ in cases where offenders are known to operate multiple online personas in the pursuit of child victims.
Online grooming: moves and strategies
Language and Law Linguagem e Direito2017
Using transcripts of chatroom grooming interactions, this paper explores and evaluates the usefulness of Swales’ (1981) move analysis framework in contributing to the current understanding of online grooming processes. The framework is applied to seven transcripts of grooming interactions taken from perverted-justice:com. The paper presents 14 identified rhetorical moves used in chatroom grooming and explores the broad structures that grooming conversations take by presenting these structures as colour-coded visualisations which we have termed “move maps”. It also examines how some individual linguistic features are used to realise a single move termed “Assessing and Managing Risk”. The findings suggest that move analysis can usefully contribute in two key ways: determining communicative functions associated with ‘grooming language’ and the visualisation of variation between grooming interactions.
