Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation

Khare, P., Shekhar, R., Karan, M., McQuistin, S. , Perkins, C. , Castro, I., Tyson, G., Healey, P. G.T. and Purver, M. (2023) Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation. In: 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL '23), Toronto, Canada, 9-14 July 2023, pp. 82-90. (doi: 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.8)

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.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This work was supported by the UK EPSRC under grants EP/S033564/1 and EP/S036075/1 (Sodestream: Streamlining Social Decision Making for Enhanced Internet Standards). Purver was also supported by the Slovenian Research Agency via research core funding for the programme Knowledge Technologies (P2-0103).
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: McQuistin, Dr Stephen and Perkins, Dr Colin
• Authors: Khare, P., Shekhar, R., Karan, M., McQuistin, S., Perkins, C., Castro, I., Tyson, G., Healey, P. G.T., and Purver, M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: 82-90
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License

Related URLs

• Organisation

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
304292		Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards	Colin Perkins	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)	EP/S036075/1	Computing Science