You Write Like You Eat: Stylistic variation as a predictor of social stratification
This work addresses social stratification analysis for researchers and social scientists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic theories and methods.
The paper tackled predicting a person's socio-economic status from their social media writing style using neural models, showing that morpho-syntactic features are effective predictors, with lexical features being better for topic prediction.
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.