You Write

Like

You Eat

Angelo Basile

June 11, 2019

Albert Gatt

Malvina Nissim

Stylistic variation

as a predictor

of social stratification

So freaking good. That’s all I’m gonna say. Don’t believe me? Walk
into the place and smell it. [. . . ] Will definitely go back.,Fresh, hand-
made pepperoni rolls. . . .. oh yeah. [...] Parking sucks, but I’m not taking off a point for that! Their marinara is dee-lish,Super tasty!!!

Let me start off saying that 2 years ago my husband and I had a spectac-
ular dinner at L’Atelier by Joel Robuchon and finally got the "Time"
to visit Joel Robuchon.We got a limo service and a nice tour inside
the mansion of Robuchon which was very memorable and the hostess
escorted us to the dining area. Decore: In comparison to L’Atelier this
place was much more chic and elegant. However, I still loved the idea
to see all the chefs preparing and decorating my plates at L’Atelier.

The Problem

The Problem

Language variation

patterns of variation in language use are explainable (statistically) at least
in part with reference to social class

Language variation

(Labov, 1962)

age

gender

location

psychology

register

Related work

Background

fourth floor

Theoretical motivation

Do speakers from different social classes use syntax in a different way?

Practical motivation

  • Build a new prediction tool
  • Build better NLP tools, more resilient to bias issues

Framing

Given a set of labelled texts, grouped by author, predict the label from text.

Text Classification

Data

TEXT

$$

AUTHOR

Distant Supervision

Hypothesis: use the price range of a restaurant as a proxy for the social class of its reviewers

(Historical note: see Labov, 1966)

All the reviews written by an author for different restaurants.

$

$$

$$$

$$

$$

$$

$$

$ - 1

$$ - 5

$$$ - 1

$$$$ - 0

$$

X

Y

LEARN

LABELLING

Education

Readability Metrics

Hypothesis: scores will be sorted (in increasing or decreasing order) from class 1 to 4

Readability Metrics

Metric $ $$ $$$ $$$$ std
Automated Readability Index 6.48   6.52 6.59  6.91  0.17
Coleman Liau Index 7.58   7.76 8.07  8.41  ​0.32
Dale-Chall Score 6.65 6.76  6.94   7 0.14
Flesch-Kincaid Ease 5.42   5.55  5.59 5.82  0.14
Gunning Fog score 13.46 13.7 14.08   14.23   0.31
Linsear Write Formula 6 5.8 5.83 5.72   0.1
Lix index 30.7   31.39  31.69 32.71  0.72
Flesch-Reading 81.06 79.93  79.1 77.39 1.34

(all results are significant at p < 0.01)

LANGUAGES

Automatically detect the language of the reviews and assign a language code to an author. Assume that each author writes in only one language.

Work on English only

Use non-English data for multi-lingual experiment

Filtering

An example:

id labels Y
1 $: 15 - $$$$: 1 $
2 $: 15 - $$$$: 14 $
entropy
0.23
0.69

Solution: discard authors whose entropy is below mean.

Filtering 2

Discard authors that have less than 40 reviews.

DATA SET

512 authors, 4 balanced classes, more or less clean (i.e. parsable) representative English texts

From ~1 million authors and ~5 millions reviews to...

Features & Modelling

Bag-of-Words (and characters)

POS Tags

Dependency Trees

Abstract features

Readability Scores

Logistic Regression

Convolutional Network

Named Entities only

Words and c h a r a c t e r s

NNS CONJ NNS

[(NNS, cc, CONJ), ...

Cvccc_05_True_117...

0.80

Las Vegas

MODELS

FEATURES

VARIATION?

Dependency Tree

Words

Cvccc - shape

117 - frequency

05 - length

True - alphanumeric?

Cvccc_05_True_117

Bleaching

Results

random

lexical

embeddings

NER

POS

syntax

abstract features

readability scores

all features

CNN w/ abstract

CNN w/ syntax

lexical multi-lingual

CNN multi-lingual

0.25

0.63

0.39

0.38

0.31

0.32

0.55

0.33

0.49

0.52*

0.46*

abstract multi-lingual

0.28

0.25

0.54*

features

accuracy

LR

NN

$
fast
kids
coffee
customer
clean
they
order
came
always
pizza

 

$$
tried
happy
staff
won
put
phoenix
find
try
place
salsa
$$$
at
clubs
wynn
music
pretty
night
club
vegas
buffet
hotel
$$$$
excellent
gras
we
las
steak
tasting
foie
wine
course
vega

Conclusions

Abstract features work well

Positive results

There is significant

 variation

between social groups

syntactic

Across languages too

What about interaction?

Shortcomings

Data is still noisy

  • Account for interaction
  • Manually label some data
  • Can humans predict social status?
  • Build a POS tagger that accounts for social status

Future Work

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