Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation

Prashant Khare, Ravi Shekhar, Mladen Karan, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Patrick Healey, Matthew Purver


Abstract
Social science and psycholinguistic research have shown that power and status affect how people use language in a range of domains. Here, we investigate a similar question in a large, distributed, consensus-driven community with little traditional power hierarchy – the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a collaborative organisation that designs internet standards. Our analysis based on lexical categories (LIWC) and BERT, shows that participants’ levels of influence can be predicted from their email text, and identify key linguistic differences (e.g., certain LIWC categories, such as “WE” are positively correlated with high-influence). We also identify the differences in language use for the same person before and after becoming influential.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
82–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prashant Khare, Ravi Shekhar, Mladen Karan, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Patrick Healey, and Matthew Purver. 2023. Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 82–90, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation (Khare et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2023.acl-short.8.pdf