Is It All in the Phrasing? Computational Explorations in How We Say What We Say, and Why It Matters

Louis Armstrong (is said to have) said, “I don’t need words — it’s all in the phrasing”. Assomeone who does natural-language processing for a living, I’m a big fan of words; but lately, mycollaborators and I have been studying aspects of phrasing (in the linguistic, rather than musicalsense) that go beyond just the selection of one particular word over another. I’ll describe some ofthese projects in this talk. The issues we’ll consider include: Does the way in which somethingis worded in and of itself have an effect on whether it is remembered or attracts attention, beyondits content or context? Can we characterize how different sides in a debate frame their arguments,in a way that goes beyond specific lexical choice (e.g., “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life”)? The settingswe’ll explore range from movie quotes that achieve cultural prominence; to posts on Facebook,Wikipedia, Twitter, and the arXiv; to framing in public discourse on the inclusion of genetically-modified organisms in food.Joint work with Lars Backstrom, Justin Cheng, Eunsol Choi, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil,Jon Kleinberg, Bo Pang, Jennifer Spindel, and Chenhao Tan. ReferencesLars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. 2013. Characterizing andcurating conversation threads: Expansion, focus, volume, re-entry. In Proceedings of WSDM, pages 13–22.Eunsol Choi, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jennifer Spindel. 2012. Hedgedetection as a lens on framing in the GMO debates: A position paper. In Proceedings of the Workshop onExtra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics, pages 70–79.Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, and Lillian Lee. 2012. You had me at hello: Howphrasing affects memorability. In Proceedings of ACL, pages 892–901. Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. 2014. A corpus of sentence-level revisions in academic writing: A step towardsunderstanding statement strength in communication. In Proceedings of ACL (short paper). Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee, and Bo Pang. 2014. The effect of wording on message propagation: Topicand author-controlled natural experiments on twitter. In Proceedings of ACL.