TalkUp: Paving the Way for Understanding Empowering Language

Lucille Njoo, Chan Young Park, Octavia Stappart, Marvin Thielk, Yi Chu, Yulia Tsvetkov

Submission Type: Regular Long Paper

Submission Track: Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics

Submission Track 2: NLP Applications

Keywords: natural language processing, empowerment

TL;DR: This paper presents TalkUp, a dataset of labeled Reddit posts, for studying empowerment in language and its relationship with social context.

Abstract: Empowering language is important in many real-world contexts, from education to workplace dynamics to healthcare. Though language technologies are growing more prevalent in these contexts, empowerment has seldom been studied in NLP, and moreover, it is inherently challenging to operationalize because of its implicit nature. This work builds from linguistic and social psychology literature to explore what characterizes empowering language. We then crowdsource a novel dataset of Reddit posts labeled for empowerment, reasons why these posts are empowering to readers, and the social relationships between posters and readers. Our preliminary analyses show that this dataset, which we call TalkUp, can be used to train language models that capture empowering and disempowering language. More broadly, TalkUp provides an avenue to explore implication, presuppositions, and how social context influences the meaning of language.

Submission Number: 5211