Not just a case for the police! The professor of journalism Dr. Thomas Hestermann of the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg and his team of researchers investigate how the police handle mentions of the origin of crime suspects and victims in police press releases. Subject to investigation is a corpus of 1.6 million police press releases containing more than 15.7 million sentences published between 2014 to 2018. The distinction of designations of origin for suspects and victims will be a central factor in the results of this research effort and cannot be accomplished robustly by simple keyword search or collocation analysis.

For this reason, LangTec supports the research effort with expertise in deep semantic text analytics. Analyses will be based on techniques permitting the clear discrimination of crime suspects and victims. Thus, while the textual realisations for denoting crime suspects and victims may be the same, deep semantic differences can be detected based on their differing deep structures.