Stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit popularity in diglossia

Huikai Chua


Abstract
Past work investigating what makes a Reddit post popular has indicated that style is a far better predictor than content, where posts conforming to a subreddit’s community style are better received. However, what about a diglossia, when there are two community styles? In Singapore, the basilect (‘Singlish’) co-exists with an acrolect (standard English), each with contrasting advantages of community identity and prestige respectively. In this paper, I apply stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit post scores in a diglossia. Using data from the Singaporean and British subreddits, I show that while the acrolect’s prestige attracts more upvotes, the most popular posts also draw on Singlish vocabulary to appeal to the community identity.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-srw.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Jad Kabbara, Haitao Lin, Amandalynne Paullada, Jannis Vamvas
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
93–100
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-srw.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huikai Chua. 2021. Stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit popularity in diglossia. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 93–100, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit popularity in diglossia (Chua, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.10.pdf