Style Matters! Investigating Linguistic Style in Online Communities
This addresses the problem of understanding community dynamics in social media for researchers, though it is incremental by shifting focus from content to style.
The paper investigated whether online communities have distinguishable linguistic styles using 262 features across 9 communities, finding that styles are distinct and can predict group membership with high accuracy (F-score 0.952, Accuracy 96.09%).
Content has historically been the primary lens used to study language in online communities. This paper instead focuses on the linguistic style of communities. While we know that individuals have distinguishable styles, here we ask whether communities have distinguishable styles. Additionally, while prior work has relied on a narrow definition of style, we employ a broad definition involving 262 features to analyze the linguistic style of 9 online communities from 3 social media platforms discussing politics, television and travel. We find that communities indeed have distinct styles. Also, style is an excellent predictor of group membership (F-score 0.952 and Accuracy 96.09%). While on average it is statistically equivalent to predictions using content alone, it is more resilient to reductions in training data.