Identifying Locus of Control in Social Media Language

Masoud Rouhizadeh, Kokil Jaidka, Laura Smith, H. Andrew Schwartz, Anneke Buffone, Lyle Ungar


Abstract
Individuals express their locus of control, or “control”, in their language when they identify whether or not they are in control of their circumstances. Although control is a core concept underlying rhetorical style, it is not clear whether control is expressed by how or by what authors write. We explore the roles of syntax and semantics in expressing users’ sense of control –i.e. being “controlled by” or “in control of” their circumstances– in a corpus of annotated Facebook posts. We present rich insights into these linguistic aspects and find that while the language signaling control is easy to identify, it is more challenging to label it is internally or externally controlled, with lexical features outperforming syntactic features at the task. Our findings could have important implications for studying self-expression in social media.
Anthology ID:
D18-1145
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1146–1152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1145
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1145
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Masoud Rouhizadeh, Kokil Jaidka, Laura Smith, H. Andrew Schwartz, Anneke Buffone, and Lyle Ungar. 2018. Identifying Locus of Control in Social Media Language. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1146–1152, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Locus of Control in Social Media Language (Rouhizadeh et al., EMNLP 2018)
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