Eideard

Dan Jurafsky of Stanford teaching computers to spot deception, anger, friendliness, flirtation

She looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective. But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars. That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie…

Programs that succeed at spotting these submerged emotions may someday have many practical uses: software that suggests when chief executives at public conferences may be straying from the truth; programs at call centers that alert operators to irate customers on the line; or software at computerized matchmaking services that adds descriptives like “friendly” to usual ones like “single” and “female.”

The technology is becoming more accurate as labs share new building blocks, said Dan Jurafsky, a professor at Stanford whose research focuses on the understanding of language by both machines and humans. Recently, Dr. Jurafsky has been studying the language that people use in four-minute speed-dating sessions, analyzing it for qualities like friendliness and flirtatiousness. He is a winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship commonly called a “genius” award, and a co-author of the textbook “Speech and Language Processing.”

“The scientific goal is to understand how our emotions are reflected in our speech,” Dr. Jurafsky said. “The engineering goal is to build better systems that understand these emotions…”

The practical political goal – from those most likely to fund this research – is to better spy on citizens of any nation.

For her continuing research, Dr. Hirschberg and two colleagues recently received a grant from the Air Force for nearly $1.5 million to develop algorithms to analyze English speakers and those who speak Arabic and Mandarin Chinese…

David F. Larcker, an accounting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, audited a course in computer linguistics taught by Dr. Jurafsky and then applied its methods to analyze the words of financial executives who made statements that were later disproved.

These executives were, it turned out, big users of “clearly,” “very clearly” and other terms that Joseph Williams, the late University of Chicago professor who wrote the textbook “Style,” branded as “trust me, stupid” words.

No mention of political campaigns, budgets developed by Congressional hearings.

Kroll, the secretive investigations consultancy, is facing embarrassment after giving a clean bill of health to a pair of alleged fraudsters who are accused of running a $248 million Ponzi scheme.

The revelation is a blow for Kroll as the American firm is still reeling from the discovery that one of its top investigators gave a similar endorsement to Sir Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire accused of orchestrating a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.

In June 2007 Kroll was asked to investigate Barry Tannenbaum, a South African, and Dean Rees on behalf of a New York-based asset management firm that was considering investingplacing a large investment with the pair.

The due diligence investigation found nothing untoward with either Tannenbaum or Rees and is said to have shown both men in a “very positive light”, according to sources.

Since then Tannenbaum and Rees have been accused of running a scheme involving the importation of antiretroviral drugs into South Africa for the treatment of HIV. They are being investigated by South African police…

The finished Kroll report is understood to have been passed on to others, unwittingly pushing even more potential victims into Tannenbaum’s alleged fraud.

Kroll declined to comment on the report…

Electri International, a Maryland based foundation for electrical contractors, is suing Kroll over $6.3 million it placed with Stanford International Bank, Sir Allen’s Antigua-based operation, even though it paid Kroll Associates $15,000 in fees, plus expenses, to conduct due diligence on the bank.

It turned out that one Kroll official was Allen Stanford’s buddy. Not that it would have colored their report. Right?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

American financier R. Allen Stanford and his wife owe back taxes, penalties and interest of at least $226.5 million, the IRS said in court documents filed in Dallas, Texas.

The final total could be even higher because the Stanfords have not filed their income tax return for 2007. The IRS says they owe $110 million in back taxes, $55.8 million in penalties and $60.7 million in interest for the 1999 through 2003 tax years.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that Stanford was behind “a fraud of shocking magnitude.” FBI agents served Stanford with SEC papers accusing him and three of his companies of orchestrating a $9.2 billion investment fraud scheme.

With the filing, the IRS joins thousands of other creditors in the case who are seeking a crack at Stanford’s remaining assets. The documents were filed in U.S. District Court on Friday, but weren’t released until Monday.

In September, Forbes magazine named Stanford No. 205 in its 400 Richest Americans article, saying he was worth more than $2 billion.

Which goes to prove that biz rags like Forbes are guilty of the same “mark to market” crap accounting that evoked most of the economic crash.