Huikai Chua


2021

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Stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit popularity in diglossia
Huikai Chua
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

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.
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