Chaski earned her Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in English and Ancient Greek from Bryn Mawr College in 1975, Master of Education in Psychology of Reading from the University of Delaware in 1981, and Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics from Brown University in 1987.
She is also the president of ALIAS Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence. In 2009 she helped to establish the Association for Linguistic Evidence, an organization devoted to making forensic linguistics "a true forensic science, compliant with both legal admissibility standards and linguistic theory." Chaski is known for her research on the "keyboard dilemma," defined as "the problem of identifying the authorship of a document that was produced by a computer to which multiple users had access." Chaski"s solution to this dilemma involves the application of a cross-validated syntactic analysis methodology. While teaching linguistics at North Carolina State University (1990–1994), Chaski was contacted by Detective West. Allison Blackman of the Raleigh Major Crimes Unit regarding the authorship of suicide notes left on a home computer.
Using syntactic and statistical analysis, she was able to show that the decedent had not authored the suicide notes, and that one roommate was a likely author
During the trial of North Carolina v Joseph Mannino for the murder of Michael Hunter, Mr. Mannino confessed on the witness stand that he had authored the suicide notes.
Chaski has served as an expert witness in federal and state Courts in the United States, in Canada and in The Hague. Her clients include major law firms, major corporate human resources, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, defense attorneys, plaintiff attorneys, security consultants and private individuals working with attorneys and police detectives.
Chaski developed—and continues to develop—ALIAS: Automated Linguistic Identification and Assessment System in order to provide objective measurements for statistical analysis.
She has provided testimony using ALIAS, without any restrictions on her ability to state conclusions, after Daubert and Frye hearings in federal and state courts. Chaski currently serves on the editorial board of Brief Chronicles, a peer reviewed journal of Shakespearean authorship studies.
As a result of this and other cases, Chaski sought and won a Visiting Research Fellowship (1995–1998) at the United States Department of Justice"s National Institute of Justice, Office of Science and Technology, Investigative and Forensic Sciences Division, where she began the validation testing which has become an increasingly important aspect of forensic sciences since the Daubert ruling.
