Identifying Interpersonal Distance using Systemic Features

Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications

Volume

Papers from the 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This paper uses Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory as a basis for extracting semantic features of documents. We focus on the pronominal and determination system and the role it plays in constructing interpersonal distance. By using a hierarchical system model that represents the author’s language choices, it is possible to construct a rich and informative feature representation. Using these systemic features, we report clear separation between registers with different interpersonal distance.