TalkUp: Paving the Way for Understanding Empowering Language
Lucille Njoo, Chan Young Park, Octavia Stappart, Marvin Thielk, Yi Chu, Yulia Tsvetkov
Abstract
Empowering language is important in many real-world contexts, from education to workplace dynamics to healthcare. Though language technologies are growing more prevalent in these contexts, empowerment has seldom been studied in NLP, and moreover, it is inherently challenging to operationalize because of its implicit nature. This work builds from linguistic and social psychology literature to explore what characterizes empowering language. We then crowdsource a novel dataset of Reddit posts labeled for empowerment, reasons why these posts are empowering to readers, and the social relationships between posters and readers. Our preliminary analyses show that this dataset, which we call TalkUp, can be used to train language models that capture empowering and disempowering language. More broadly, TalkUp provides an avenue to explore implication, presuppositions, and how social context influences the meaning of language.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
njoo2023talkup,
title={TalkUp: Paving the Way for Understanding Empowering Language},
author={Lucille Njoo and Chan Young Park and Octavia Stappart and Marvin Thielk and Yi Chu and Yulia Tsvetkov},
booktitle={The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=QYSPlIZ6bV}
}