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 socioeconomic 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.