Discovering Sociolinguistic Associations with Structured Sparsity

We present a method to discover robust and interpretable sociolinguistic associations from raw geotagged text data. Using aggregate demographic statistics about the authors’ geographic communities, we solve a multi-output regression problem between demographics and lexical frequencies. By imposing a composite 1,∞ regularizer, we obtain structured sparsity, driving entire rows of coefficients to zero. We perform two regression studies. First, we use term frequencies to predict demographic attributes; our method identifies a compact set of words that are strongly associated with author demographics. Next, we conjoin demographic attributes into features, which we use to predict term frequencies. The composite regularizer identifies a small number of features, which correspond to communities of authors united by shared demographic and linguistic properties.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Noah A. Smith, Eric P. Xing
• Keywords: ACL 2011, Computational Linguistics, Geographic Communities, Linguistic Properties, Regression Problem