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
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/Q16-1005.pdf