Alignment, Acceptance, and Rejection of Group Identities in Online Political Discourse

Hagyeong Shin, Gabriel Doyle


Abstract
Conversation is a joint social process, with participants cooperating to exchange information. This process is helped along through linguistic alignment: participants’ adoption of each other’s word use. This alignment is robust, appearing many settings, and is nearly always positive. We create an alignment model for examining alignment in Twitter conversations across antagonistic groups. This model finds that some word categories, specifically pronouns used to establish group identity and common ground, are negatively aligned. This negative alignment is observed despite other categories, which are less related to the group dynamics, showing the standard positive alignment. This suggests that alignment is strongly biased toward cooperative alignment, but that different linguistic features can show substantially different behaviors.
Anthology ID:
N18-4001
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Editors:
Silvio Ricardo Cordeiro, Shereen Oraby, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Kyeongmin Rim
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–8
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-4001
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-4001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hagyeong Shin and Gabriel Doyle. 2018. Alignment, Acceptance, and Rejection of Group Identities in Online Political Discourse. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 1–8, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Alignment, Acceptance, and Rejection of Group Identities in Online Political Discourse (Shin & Doyle, NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-4001.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N18-4001.mp4