Extracting Social Power Relationships from Natural Language

Sociolinguists have long argued that social context influences language use in all manner of ways, resulting in lects. This paper explores a text classification problem we will call lect modeling, an example of what has been termed computational sociolinguistics. In particular, we use machine learning techniques to identify social power relationships between members of a social network, based purely on the content of their interpersonal communication. We rely on statistical methods, as opposed to language-specific engineering, to extract features which represent vocabulary and grammar usage indicative of social power lect. We then apply support vector machines to model the social power lects representing superior-subordinate communication in the Enron email corpus. Our results validate the treatment of lect modeling as a text classification problem -- albeit a hard one -- and constitute a case for future research in computational sociolinguistics.