Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

Software to determine truthfulness of court witnesses

By: DOLAN MEDIA NEWSWIRES//March 12, 2013//

Software to determine truthfulness of court witnesses

By: DOLAN MEDIA NEWSWIRES//March 12, 2013//

Listen to this article

By Ed Wesoloski
Dolan Media Newswires

From the Wall Street Journal Law Blog comes word that Italian computer scientists are developing software designed to determine whether court witnesses are speaking the truth or telling a big fat whopper.

Researchers “compiled transcripts of court hearings at which the defendants or witnesses were later condemned for making false or deceptive statements.

“Using text analysis software, they fed the computer transcripts, telling it which statements were true or false and teaching it to pick up patterns in the testimony. They then tested the model on another portion of the transcripts segregated from the analysis and unfamiliar to the computer.”

So, how is the software performing?

“The system correctly identified false statements 53 (percent) of the time. That’s not quite as bad as it seems since only a third of statements were false. In other words, if the computer answered false every time, it would be right only about a third of the time. It identified true statements correctly roughly 75 (percent) of the time.

“‘Our system is much better with true statements than with deceptive ones,’” Massimo Poesio, who co-authored the study, told Law Blog.

“Will there ever be a day when a computer could be summoned for jury duty? ‘Honestly, I don’t think so,’ said Tommaso Fornaciari, a psychologist for Italy’s national police and the other author of the study. He said the goal is to use it as a tool for investigators to help ‘orient them toward more probable paths.’”

The study was reported in the academic journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Polls

Should Steven Avery be granted a new evidentiary hearing?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Legal News

See All Legal News

WLJ People

Sea all WLJ People

Opinion Digests