[1]. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., Sudhof, M., Jurafsky, D., Leskovec, J., & Potts, C. (2013) “A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors”.
[2]. Voigt, R., Camp, N. P., Prabhakaran, V., Hamilton, W. L., Hetey, R. C., Griffiths, C. M., … & Eberhardt, J. L. (2017) “Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect”.
The Danescu et al. paper proposes a framework for identifying linguistic aspects of politeness in requests. They analyze requests in two online communities: Stack Exchange and Wikipedia on exploring the content politeness on social platforms like Wikipedia, Stack Exchange. They annotated over 10,000 utterances from over 400,000 requests using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using this corpus of over 10,000 utterances, they conducted a linguistic analysis by constructing a politeness classifier. Their study shows that politeness and power are negatively correlated, that is, the politeness level decreases with increase in power. They also show the relationship between politeness and gender.
In second paper, Voigt et al. investigate that the language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect. They analyzed footages from police body-worn cameras, and conducted three studies to identify how respectful police officers are towards white and black community members by applying computational linguistic methods on transcripts. Their results show that police officers show less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling various factors such as race of the officer or location of stop.
I particularly liked how they prepared data in both papers especially in second. In first paper, they tried to mitigate the affects of subjectivity of politeness and explained how people are more polite before becoming admins. But does it matter? I am not sure about Wikipedia but on Stack Exchange, the elections are majorly independent of their past. I vote people by just reading at their story and plans for community and I never go to their profile and look at each of their questions that how polite were they. Therefore, can we claim that people show politeness to gain power? I don’t think so. Secondly, we know that politeness and power have inverse relationships in real world as well. Therefore, can we generalize this? Can we claim that online communities are similar to real world communities? Because repercussions of being impolite are very different in both.
The second paper has very thorough analysis and there is hardly anything wrong with the study they performed. It was really interesting to see that how formality decreases with increase in time in general but in a higher crime rate formality increases. In the first study, they randomly sampled 414 unique officer utterances and asked participants to rate it. Is out of context utterance from middle of conversation a true predictor of politeness? Also, I believe that using Oakland for study without explaining black vs. white crime rates in Oakland is somewhat naïve approach. It might be possible that crime rate by black community members in the Oakland is higher and hence as a result police officers are less polite towards them. Also, the paper explains that there is no correlation of politeness with race of police officer. Does this mean that even a black officer is less polite towards black community member? If so, then crime rate must be looked at. Otherwise, the analysis and modeling in paper was very well presented.
