I'm a Belieber: Social Roles via Self-identification and Conceptual Attributes

Motivated by work predicting coarsegrained author categories in social media, such as gender or political preference, we explore whether Twitter contains information to support the prediction of finegrained categories, or social roles. We find that the simple self-identification pattern “I am a ” supports significantly richer classification than previously explored, successfully retrieving a variety of fine-grained roles. For a given role (e.g., writer), we can further identify characteristic attributes using a simple possessive construction (e.g., writer’s ). Tweets that incorporate the attribute terms in first person possessives (my ) are confirmed to be an indicator that the author holds the associated social role.