Discovering the Functions of Language in Online Forums

Youmna Ismaeil, Oana Balalau, Paramita Mirza


Abstract
In this work, we revisit the functions of language proposed by linguist Roman Jakobson and we highlight their potential in analyzing online forum conversations. We investigate the relationship between functions and other properties of comments, such as controversiality. We propose and evaluate a semi-supervised framework for predicting the functions of Reddit comments. To accommodate further research, we release a corpus of 165K comments annotated with their functions of language.
Anthology ID:
D19-5534
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Tim Baldwin, Afshin Rahimi
Venue:
WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
259–264
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5534
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-5534
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Youmna Ismaeil, Oana Balalau, and Paramita Mirza. 2019. Discovering the Functions of Language in Online Forums. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019), pages 259–264, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discovering the Functions of Language in Online Forums (Ismaeil et al., WNUT 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-5534.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-5534.Attachment.zip