Laura Smith


2018

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Identifying Locus of Control in Social Media Language
Masoud Rouhizadeh | Kokil Jaidka | Laura Smith | H. Andrew Schwartz | Anneke Buffone | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Individuals express their locus of control, or “control”, in their language when they identify whether or not they are in control of their circumstances. Although control is a core concept underlying rhetorical style, it is not clear whether control is expressed by how or by what authors write. We explore the roles of syntax and semantics in expressing users’ sense of control –i.e. being “controlled by” or “in control of” their circumstances– in a corpus of annotated Facebook posts. We present rich insights into these linguistic aspects and find that while the language signaling control is easy to identify, it is more challenging to label it is internally or externally controlled, with lexical features outperforming syntactic features at the task. Our findings could have important implications for studying self-expression in social media.

2016

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Does ‘well-being’ translate on Twitter?
Laura Smith | Salvatore Giorgi | Rishi Solanki | Johannes Eichstaedt | H. Andrew Schwartz | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | Anneke Buffone | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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The role of personality, age, and gender in tweeting about mental illness
Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro | Johannes Eichstaedt | Gregory Park | Maarten Sap | Laura Smith | Victoria Tobolsky | H. Andrew Schwartz | Lyle Ungar
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality