Characterizing the Language of Online Communities and its Relation to Community Reception

By Trang Tran, Mari Ostendorf. 2016

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This work investigates style and topic aspects of language in online communities: looking at both utility as an identifier of the community and correlation with community reception of content. Style is characterized using a hybrid word and part-of-speech tag n-gram language model, while topic is represented using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Experiments with several Reddit forums show that style is a better indicator of community identity than topic, even for communities organized around specific topics. Further, there is a positive correlation between the community reception to a contribution and the style similarity to that community, but not so for topic similarity.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

• Semantic Variation in Online Communities of Practice (2018, unknown): “…other related work has focused on how acceptance into existing communities is mediated by the adoption of community norms (Nguyen and Ros´e, 2011; Tran and Ostendorf, 2016) and on how the process whereby linguistic innovations become norms can be leveraged to predict the permanence of a user in…”