About the lexicon
This is the first corpus-based multilingual lexicon of digital forensics and was developed as part of the CLARUS (Building clarity and preventing bias in digital forensic examination, interorganisational communication and interaction) project, funded by Horizon Europe (grant number 101121182) and UKRI (2023-2026). The project website is: Home | Clarus Project.
The lexicon was developed through a corpus-based analysis of written and spoken material collected from digital forensic practitioners and related professionals in five partner countries: Greece, Scotland, Czech Republic, Finland and Portugal. These materials included procedural and legal documents, as well as transcripts from interviews and focus groups. The whole consortium of Clarus project contributed to the collection of such material.
The lexicon includes the following components:
Term and semantic category: Each term (e.g., "EXIF" - Exchangeable Image File Format) is accompanied by its semantic category (e.g., semantic category: digital evidence). The semantic category indicates whether the term refers to digital evidence, digital forensics methods, digital technology, forensic infrastructure, or legal frameworks, etc. This categorisation helps practitioners understand the conceptual domain of the term and its functional role within digital forensic practice.
Multilingual equivalents: Each term has translations in Czech, Finnish, Greek, and Portuguese.
Part of speech and frequency information: Each entry specifies the term’s grammatical category (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) and provides a frequency indicator represented by bars: a single bar for low frequency, two bars for medium frequency, and three bars for high frequency).
Definition: The definition section offers a clear and concise explanation of the term as used specifically in digital forensics contexts, derived from the corpus analysis.
Collocates: A key feature of the lexicon is the collocations section, which identifies words that frequently and significantly occur immediately before (Left) or after (Right) the term. This information supports natural and professional usage. A left collocate refers to a word that typically precedes the term. For instance, for "cloud storage," the left collocate is "utilising," forming "utilising cloud storage." A right collocate refers to a word that commonly follows the term. For "cloud storage," the right collocation is "accessed," forming "cloud storage accessed".
Usage example: The usage example demonstrates how the term is used in an authentic professional context. Each example includes (a) the English original, a sentence illustrating natural, professional usage; (b) domain specificity, indicating the type of text (e.g., procedural/instructive or legislative) in which the example occurs; and (c) translations.
The team behind the lexicon
The lexicon was developed by Dr Duygu Candarli (lead, University of Dundee/University of Southampton) and Dr James Balfour (co-lead, University of Glasgow). Duygu Candarli and James Balfour constructed the corpus from which the lexicon was created, developed the methodology, and wrote the entries and associated information in English. Research assistants, Ondřej Schmid and Anna Staňková (PACR), supported this work, particularly during the early stages of the project, mainly through corpus construction.
The lexicon website interface was designed by Dr John Lawrence (University of Dundee).
The translations were overseen by the practitioner partners of the project listed below:
- Police University College (POLAMK) – Finland
- Center for Security Studies (KEMEA) - Greece
- Hellenic Police (HPOL) - Greece
- Police of the Czech Republic (PPCR) - Czech Republic
- Judiciary Police (PJ) - Portugal
- National Civil Police (PSP) - Portugal
The scientific leader of the CLARUS project was Professor Megan O’Neill (University of Dundee). The project Coordinator was Andriani Retzepi (KEMEA).
Authors and developers of the lexicon: Duygu Candarli and James Balfour. If you have any questions about the lexicon, please contact them at d.candarli@soton.ac.uk and james.balfour@glasgow.ac.uk.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC) license. You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original authors and that any changes made are indicated.