Umashanthi Pavalanathan


2018

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Interactional Stancetaking in Online Forums
Scott F. Kiesling | Umashanthi Pavalanathan | Jim Fitzpatrick | Xiaochuang Han | Jacob Eisenstein
Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 4 - December 2018

Language is shaped by the relationships between the speaker/writer and the audience, the object of discussion, and the talk itself. In turn, language is used to reshape these relationships over the course of an interaction. Computational researchers have succeeded in operationalizing sentiment, formality, and politeness, but each of these constructs captures only some aspects of social and relational meaning. Theories of interactional stancetaking have been put forward as holistic accounts, but until now, these theories have been applied only through detailed qualitative analysis of (portions of) a few individual conversations. In this article, we propose a new computational operationalization of interpersonal stancetaking. We begin with annotations of three linked stance dimensions—affect, investment, and alignment—on 68 conversation threads from the online platform Reddit. Using these annotations, we investigate thread structure and linguistic properties of stancetaking in online conversations. We identify lexical features that characterize the extremes along each stancetaking dimension, and show that these stancetaking properties can be predicted with moderate accuracy from bag-of-words features, even with a relatively small labeled training set. These quantitative analyses are supplemented by extensive qualitative analysis, highlighting the compatibility of computational and qualitative methods in synthesizing evidence about the creation of interactional meaning.

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Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Silvio Ricardo Cordeiro | Shereen Oraby | Umashanthi Pavalanathan | Kyeongmin Rim
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

2017

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A Multidimensional Lexicon for Interpersonal Stancetaking
Umashanthi Pavalanathan | Jim Fitzpatrick | Scott Kiesling | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The sociolinguistic construct of stancetaking describes the activities through which discourse participants create and signal relationships to their interlocutors, to the topic of discussion, and to the talk itself. Stancetaking underlies a wide range of interactional phenomena, relating to formality, politeness, affect, and subjectivity. We present a computational approach to stancetaking, in which we build a theoretically-motivated lexicon of stance markers, and then use multidimensional analysis to identify a set of underlying stance dimensions. We validate these dimensions intrinscially and extrinsically, showing that they are internally coherent, match pre-registered hypotheses, and correlate with social phenomena.

2015

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Confounds and Consequences in Geotagged Twitter Data
Umashanthi Pavalanathan | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing