Language scientists and ecologists have teamed up to help police trap criminals by reading their text messages.
They are adapting methods of studying life in the oceans to identify anonymous text authors by their writing style.
Linguistic expert Dr Tim Grant, of the University of Aston, in Birmingham, sought the help of ecologists who differentiate between marine environments by seeing how close or far apart they are in terms of species.
Applying the same statistical method to text messages, he believes he can show the similarities and differences between different writing extracts.
For example, the recurrence of the words "me" and "meself" in place of "my" and "myself" gives a clue to the identity of the sender.
Individually, the patterns add only a small amount of understanding but, when enough patterns are found, a clearer picture emerges.
The scientists hope the system will be sufficiently rigorous to be used in court within four or five years.
So far the researchers have collected around 8,000 text messages from almost 1,000 members of the public.
Dr Grant said: "We can measure similarity and difference by means of the stylistic distance between any two text messages. continues here
Had enuff yet m8 y dun u wake up
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