"You're Mr. Lebowski, I'm the Dude": Inducing Address Term Formality in Signed Social Networks

Understand

We present an unsupervised model for inducing signed social networks from the content exchanged across network edges.

• Inference in this model solves three problems simultaneously: (1) identifying the sign of each edge; (2) characterizing the distribution over content for each edge type; (3) estimating weights for triadic features that map to theoretical models such as structural balance.
• We apply this model to the problem of inducing the social function of address terms, such as 'Madame', 'comrade', and 'dude'.
• On a dataset of movie scripts, our system obtains a coherent clustering of address terms, while at the same time making intuitively plausible judgments of the formality of social relations in each film.