Written Goodbyes: How Genre and Sociolinguistic Factors Influence the Content and Style of Suicide Notes

Lucia Busso, Claudia Roberta Combei


Abstract
The study analyses a novel corpus of 76 freely available English authentic suicide notes (SNs) (letters and social media posts), spanning from 1902 to 2023. By using computational and corpus linguistics, this research aims at decoding patterns of discourse, content, and emotions in SNs. In particular, we explore variation in linguistic features in SNs across sociolinguistic factors (age, gender, addressee, time period) and between genres (letter vs. post). To this end, we use topic models, subjectivity analysis, and sentiment and emotion analysis. Results highlight how both style, content, and emotion expression, show differences depending on genre, gender, age group and time period. We suggest a more nuanced approach to personalized prevention and intervention strategies based on insights from computer-assisted linguistic analysis.
Anthology ID:
2024.clicit-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024)
Month:
December
Year:
2024
Address:
Pisa, Italy
Editors:
Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessandro Lenci, Simonetta Montemagni, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venue:
CLiC-it
SIG:
Publisher:
CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Note:
Pages:
114–121
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucia Busso and Claudia Roberta Combei. 2024. Written Goodbyes: How Genre and Sociolinguistic Factors Influence the Content and Style of Suicide Notes. In Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024), pages 114–121, Pisa, Italy. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Cite (Informal):
Written Goodbyes: How Genre and Sociolinguistic Factors Influence the Content and Style of Suicide Notes (Busso & Combei, CLiC-it 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clicit-1.15.pdf