
Melissa Wright, MA (REP)
Melissa Wright, MA has a background in journalism, digital marketing, website development, and computational syntactic linguistics.
Ms. Wright earned her master’s in linguistics from Northern Illinois University in 2017. While there, she completed a year-long master’s thesis research project differentiating the character dialogue from the narration of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray using computational syntactic methodology. In 2018, her work was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Award in the category of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, and she was the university’s representative for the 2018 Midwestern Association of Graduate School regional thesis competition.
Since graduating, Ms Wright has worked in the digital marketing realm, and, more recently, has been working in a variety of positions for the Institute for Linguistic Evidence (ILE). She serves as the Managing Editor for LESLI: Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence, the Managing Director for ILE, the Membership Coordinator for The Association for Linguistic Evidence (TALE), and the Assistant Director of Research for ILE. She also works as a linguistic consultant for a company that performs discourse analysis of doctor-patient conversations, and for a company providing resources targeted toward linguistics majors. She and her psychotherapist husband are developing a communication research, analysis, and consulting platform for those who want to improve their communication styles within their relationships. Finally, she is a contractual staff linguist at ALIAS Technology LLC.
Ms Wright’s main interests are authorship attribution, computational linguistics, and syntax. She is a Provisional Member of the REP track.