You Write like You Eat: Stylistic Variation as a Predictor of Social Stratification

AbstractInspired by Labov’s seminal work on stylisticvariation as a function of social stratification,we develop and compare neural models thatpredict a person’s presumed socio-economicstatus, obtained through distant supervision,from their writing style on social media. Thefocus of our work is on identifying the mostimportant stylistic parameters to predict socio-economic group. In particular, we show theeffectiveness of morpho-syntactic features aspredictors of style, in contrast to lexical fea-tures, which are good predictors of topic