Characterizing the Language of Online Communities and its Relation to Community Reception

Abstract: This work investigates style and topic aspects of language in online communities: looking at both utility as an identifier of the community and correlation with community reception of content. Style is characterized using a hybrid word and part-of-speech tag n-gram LLM, while topic is represented using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Experiments with several Reddit forums show that style is a better indicator of community identity than topic, even for communities organized around specific topics. Further, there is a positive correlation between the community reception to a contribution and the style similarity to that community, but not so for topic similarity.