Combating the identity problem is crucial and urgent as false identity has become a common denominator of many serious crimes, including mafia trafficking and terrorism. Without correct identification, it is very difficult for law enforcement authority to intervene, or even trace terrorists’ activities. Amongst several identity attributes, personal names are commonly, and effortlessly, falsified or aliased by most criminals. Typical approaches to detecting the use of false identity rely on the similarity measure of textual and other content-based characteristics, which are (...) usually not applicable in the case of highly deceptive, erroneous and unknown descriptions. This barrier can be overcome through analysis of link information displayed by the individual in communication behaviours, financial interactions and social networks. In particular, this paper presents a novel link-based approach that improves existing techniques by integrating multiple link properties in the process of similarity evaluation. It is utilised in a hybrid model that proficiently combines both text-based and link-based measures of examined names to refine the justification of their similarity. This approach is experimentally evaluated against other link-based and text-based techniques, over a terrorist-related dataset, with further generalization to a similar problem occurring in publication databases. The empirical study demonstrates the great potential of this work towards developing an effective identity verification system. (shrink)

In patent law most of the crucial legal questions such as patentability and infringement are linked to the patent claims. The European Patent Office regards patent claims as a set of independent features which are examined separately in a more or less formal way. The author has found that this approach allows for developing a simple mathematical model which treats patent claim features as logical statements and patent claims as compound statements wherein the individual statements are connected by logical connectives. (...) The proposed mathematical model provides a uniform system for examining various legal questions that are dealt with separately under current case law, moreover, it allows for developing an expert system for resolving complex legal situations and for automating the evaluation of a large number of patent claim variants that is currently not possible. (shrink)