You Write Like You Eat: Stylistic variation as a predictor of social stratification

Abstract

Inspired by Labov's seminal work on stylistic variation as a function of social stratification, we develop and compare neural models that predict a person's presumed socio-economic status, obtained through distant supervision,from their writing style on social media. The focus of our work is on identifying the most important stylistic parameters to predict socio-economic group. In particular, we show the effectiveness of morpho-syntactic features as stylistic predictors of socio-economic group,in contrast to lexical features, which are good predictors of topic.