Research Papers

Published Papers

Envy: The Artist's Undoing (2025)

Published in the Palouse Review Literary Arts Journal March 2025 Edition. The journal is based in Washington State University.

Working Papers

Fake or Nah? A linguistic approach to detecting misinformation using machine learning and linguistic features (2025)

Misinformation has become one of the most pressing linguistic and technological challenges of the last decade, spreading rapidly across digital platforms and reshaping public understanding of politics, public health, and current events. While computational approaches to fake-news detection often rely on lexical or topic-based features, emerging research suggests that stylistic and structural linguistic patterns offer a powerful, interpretable source of insight. This study presents Fake or Nah?, a machine-learning model designed to classify fake and true news by integrating TF-IDF lexical vectors with linguistically motivated identifiers. Drawing on prior work in psycholinguistics, NLP, and deception detection, the project evaluates how punctuation, sentiment, lexical diversity, profanity, and part-of-speech distributions correlate with misinformation.

Using a balanced dataset of 44,000+ articles from Kaggle, the study extracts identifiers such as question and exclamation mark frequency, VADER sentiment, noun density, pronoun ratios, and vocabulary richness. Statistical testing (Welch’s t-tests) reveals significant stylistic differences: fake news employs substantially more rhetorical punctuation, exhibits more negative sentiment, contains higher profanity rates, and demonstrates lower noun density than factual reporting. Three models—TF-IDF Logistic Regression, identifier-only Logistic Regression, and a hybrid model—were trained and evaluated. The hybrid model achieved the strongest performance (≈98% accuracy, AUC ≈ 0.99), indicating that linguistic features meaningfully enhance predictive power while improving interpretability.

Overall, the findings support the claim that misinformation is linguistically distinctive, not merely factually incorrect. By foregrounding stylistic features based in linguistic theory, Fake or Nah? demonstrates how computational linguistics can contribute to more transparent, robust, and interpretable misinformation-detection systems. Future work will expand to multilingual datasets, rhetorical-device analysis, and real-world deployment.

Completed for AI4ALL Ignite & Linguistics 103: Psycholinguistics (Glendale Community College)

Multilingualism and the Construction of Identity in Postcolonial Morocco (2025)

This paper examines the role of multilingualism in the construction of identity in postcolonial Morocco, with a focus on the lasting influence of French colonial hegemony on linguistic hierarchies. Situated within Morocco’s complex sociolinguistic landscape, the study explores how language continues to function as a mechanism of power through education, professional access, and social prestige, even decades after independence. The analysis is framed by Robert Phillipson’s theory of linguistic imperialism and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and linguistic capital.

The study combines a historical and theoretical review with a qualitative single-case design based on an interview and follow-up questionnaire with a multilingual Moroccan language educator who grew up during the post-protectorate period. This case study provides insight into how colonial language policies have shaped everyday linguistic practices and identity formation. The findings show that French, despite lacking official status, remains a prestige language associated with higher education, employment, and socioeconomic mobility, thereby reproducing colonial-era inequalities along class and educational lines.

At the same time, Arabic occupies a position of strong symbolic legitimacy as a marker of national identity, religion, and resistance to colonial domination, while Amazigh represents localized and rural identity. These dynamics illustrate that multilingualism in Morocco does not dismantle linguistic hierarchy but instead compels individuals to navigate unequal linguistic values in the construction of identity. The participant’s experiences highlight how colonial legacies persist through social practice, revealing an ongoing negotiation between language, power, and identity in postcolonial Morocco.

Completed for Linguistics 102: Sociolinguistics (Glendale Community College)

Taming the Shadow: Analysis of the Jungian “Shadow” Archetype in the works of William Blake and David Lynch (2025)

This paper explores Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow through the comparative analysis of Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” and Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, examining how both artists depict the duality of innocence and corruption within the human psyche. Drawing on Jungian archetypal psychology, the study proposes a four-stage model—The Stages of Shadow Work—to illustrate how individuals can overcome their shadow to achieve balance within the self. By tracing these psychological processes through Blake’s poetic symbolism and Lynch’s cinematic imagery, the paper highlights the enduring relevance of Jung’s theory in understanding the human struggle between good and evil.

Completed for English 102H (Glendale Community College)