An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication

Ellie Pavlick, Joel Tetreault


Abstract
This paper presents an empirical study of linguistic formality. We perform an analysis of humans’ perceptions of formality in four different genres. These findings are used to develop a statistical model for predicting formality, which is evaluated under different feature settings and genres. We apply our model to an investigation of formality in online discussion forums, and present findings consistent with theories of formality and linguistic coordination.
Anthology ID:
Q16-1005
Erratum e1:
Q16-1005e1
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4
Month:
Year:
2016
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Lillian Lee, Mark Johnson, Kristina Toutanova
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
61–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q16-1005
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00083
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ellie Pavlick and Joel Tetreault. 2016. An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 4:61–74.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Analysis of Formality in Online Communication (Pavlick & Tetreault, TACL 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q16-1005.pdf