A Multidimensional Lexicon for Interpersonal Stancetaking

Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Jim Fitzpatrick, Scott Kiesling, Jacob Eisenstein


Abstract
The sociolinguistic construct of stancetaking describes the activities through which discourse participants create and signal relationships to their interlocutors, to the topic of discussion, and to the talk itself. Stancetaking underlies a wide range of interactional phenomena, relating to formality, politeness, affect, and subjectivity. We present a computational approach to stancetaking, in which we build a theoretically-motivated lexicon of stance markers, and then use multidimensional analysis to identify a set of underlying stance dimensions. We validate these dimensions intrinscially and extrinsically, showing that they are internally coherent, match pre-registered hypotheses, and correlate with social phenomena.
Anthology ID:
P17-1082
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
884–895
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1082
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1082
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Jim Fitzpatrick, Scott Kiesling, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2017. A Multidimensional Lexicon for Interpersonal Stancetaking. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 884–895, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Multidimensional Lexicon for Interpersonal Stancetaking (Pavalanathan et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1082.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P17-1082.mp4