You Write like You Eat: Stylistic Variation as a Predictor of Social Stratification

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2583–2593 Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 2583 You Write Like You Eat: Stylistic variation as a predictor of social stratification Angelo Basile Symanto Research Nürnberg, Germany angelo.basile@symanto.net Albert Gatt University of Malta Msida, Malta albert.gatt@um.edu.mt Malvina Nissim University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands m.nissim@rug.nl Abstract Inspired by Labov’s seminal work on stylistic variation as a function of social stratification, we develop and compare neural models that predict a person’s presumed socio-economic status, obtained through distant supervision, from their writing style on social media. The focus of our work is on identifying the most important stylistic parameters to predict socio- economic group. In particular, we show the effectiveness of morpho-syntactic features as stylistic predictors of socio-economic group, in contrast to lexical features, which are good predictors of topic. 1 Introduction In 1966, linguist William Labov set out to cor- roborate experimentally his observation that in New York City, variation in the pronunciation of postvocalic [r] (as in "car", "for", "pour") is sub- ject to social stratification that is, that NYC people with different socio-economic backgrounds will realise that phoneme in different ways (Labov, 1966, 2006). Avoiding artificially elicited language in favour of spontaneous language use, Labov picked three large department stores from the top, middle, and bottom of the price/prestige range, under the as- sumption that customers (and salespersons) of these establishments would belong to different so- cial strata. "[Labov’s study] was designed to test two ideas [. . . ]: first, that the variable (r) is a so- cial differentiator in all levels of New York City speech; and second, that casual and anonymous speech events could be used as the basis for a sys- tematic study of language." (Labov, 2006, p. 40. Italics ours.) Inspired by Labov’s work and the recent surge of interest in computational social science (Cioffi- Revilla, 2016) and computational sociolinguistics (e.g. Johannsen et al., 2015), we set out to in- vestigate whether and to what extent variations in writing style, analysed in terms of several linguis- tic variables, are influenced by socio-economic status (RQ1; see below). To do so, we use user-generated restaurant reviews on social me- dia. User-generated content bears important simi- larities to Labov’s "casual and anonymous speech events" on at least two fronts: 1) anonymity is here still preserved since we are not including personal information about the authors; furthermore 2) so- cial media are now recognised in the literature as a source of naturally (i.e. casual) occurring text that can be used to investigate various sociolinguis- tic phenomena (Herda˘gdelen, 2013; Pavalanathan and Eisenstein, 2015). Labov’s use of the prestige of a store as a proxy for the social class of its customers and employ- ees could be seen as a precursor of distant su- pervision, an approach which we employ in this study. We leverage online restaurant reviews, and our assumption for acquiring labels is that the socio-economic group of …

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