Modeling of Stylistic Variation in Social Media with Stretchy Patterns

In this paper we describe a novel feature discovery technique that can be used to model stylistic variation in sociolects. While structural features offer much in terms of expressive power over simpler features used more frequently in machine learning approaches to modeling linguistic variation, they frequently come at an excessive cost in terms of feature space size expansion. We propose a novel form of structural features referred to as “stretchy patterns” that strike a balance between expressive power and compactness in order to enable modeling stylistic variation with reasonably small datasets. As an example we focus on the problem of modeling variation related to gender in personal blogs. Our evaluation demonstrates a significant improvement over standard baselines.