TalkUp: Paving the Way for Understanding Empowering Language
This addresses the problem of understanding implicit empowerment in language for applications in education, workplace, and healthcare, representing an incremental step in NLP research.
The paper tackles the challenge of operationalizing empowering language in NLP by creating TalkUp, a crowdsourced dataset of Reddit posts labeled for empowerment, reasons, and social relationships, and shows it can train models to capture such language.
Empowering language is important in many real-world contexts, from education to workplace dynamics to healthcare. Though language technologies are growing more prevalent in these contexts, empowerment has seldom been studied in NLP, and moreover, it is inherently challenging to operationalize because of its implicit nature. This work builds from linguistic and social psychology literature to explore what characterizes empowering language. We then crowdsource a novel dataset of Reddit posts labeled for empowerment, reasons why these posts are empowering to readers, and the social relationships between posters and readers. Our preliminary analyses show that this dataset, which we call TalkUp, can be used to train language models that capture empowering and disempowering language. More broadly, TalkUp provides an avenue to explore implication, presuppositions, and how social context influences the meaning of language.