Facebook and the Real World:Correlations between Online and Offline Conversations
Authors: Fabio Celli, Luca Polonio (Università di Trento, 2015)
Topic: Textual Genres & Literature Linguistics

Abstract
Are there correlations between language usage in conversations on Facebook and face to face meetings? To answer this question, we collected transcriptions from face to face multi-party conversations between 11 participants, and retrieved their Facebook threads. We automatically annotated the psycholinguistic dimensions in the two domains by means of the LIWC dictionary, and we performed correlation analysis. Results show that some Facebook dimensions, such as “likes” and shares, have a counterpart in face to face communication, in particular the number of questions and the length of statements. The corpus we collected has been anonymized and is available for research purposes.

Introduction
In recent years we had great advancements in the analysis of communication, in face to face meetings as well as in Online Social Networks (OSN) (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). For example, resources for computational psycholinguistics like the Linguistic Enquiry Word Count (LIWC) (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010), have been applied to OSN like Facebook and Twitter for personality recognition tasks (Golbeck et al., 2011) (Schwartz et al., 2013) (Celli and Polonio, 2013) (Quercia et al., 2011). Interesting psychological research analyzed the motivations behind OSN usage (Gosling et al., 2011) (Seidman, 2013) and whether user profiles in OSN reflect acual personaliy or a selfidealization (Back et al., 2010). Also Conversation Analysis (CA) of face to face meetings, that has a long history dating back to the ’70s (Sacks et al., 1974), has taken advantage of computational techniques, addressing detection of consensus in business meetings (Pianesi et al., 2007), multimodal personality recognition (Pianesi et al., 2008) and dectection of conflicts from speech (Kim et al., 2012). In this paper we make a comparison of the linguistic behaviour of OSN users both online and in face to face meetings. To do so, we collected Facebook data from 11 volunteer users, who participated to an experimental setting where we recorded face to face multiparty conversations of their meetings. Our goal is to discover relationships between a rich set of psycholinguistic dimensions (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010) extracted from Facebook metadata and meeting transcriptions. Our contributions to the research in the fields on Conversation Analysis and Social Network Analysis are: the release of a corpus of speech transcriptions aligned to Facebook data in Italian and the analysis of correlations between psycholinguistic dimensions in the two settings. The paper is structured as follows: in section 2 we describe the corpora and the data collection, in section 3 we explain the method adopted and report the results, in section 4 we draw some conclusions.

Conclusion
In this paper, we attempted to analyse the correlations between psycholinguistic dimensions observed in Facebook and face to face meetings. We found that the type of words significantly correlated to both settings are related to strong emotions (anger and anxiety), We suggest that these are linguistic dimensions difficult to control and tend to be constant in different settings. Crucially, we also found that likes received on Facebook are correlated to the tendency to ask questions in meetings. Literature on impression formation/management report that people with high self-esteem in meetings will elicit self-esteem enhancing reactions from others (Hass, 1981). This could explain the link between the tendency to ask questions in meetings with unknown people and the tendency to post contents that elicit likes in Facebook. Moreover, the tendency to ask questions in spoken conversations is correlated to observed emotional stability (Mairesse et al., 2007) and that emotionally stable users in Twitter tend to have more replies in conversations than neurotic users (Celli and Rossi, 2012). We suggest that the correlation we found can be partially explained by these two privious findings. Another very interesting finding is that the tendency to be reshared on Facebook correlates to the tendency to speak a lot in face to face meetings. Again, literature about impression formation/management can explain this, because people with high self-esteem tend to engage people and to speak a lot, while people adopting defensive strategies tend to be assertive less argumentative. In linguistics it is an open debate whether virality depends from the influence of the source (Zaman et al., 2010) or the content of message being shared (Guerini et al., 2011) (Suh et al., 2010). In particular, the content that evokes higharousal positive (amusement) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral, while content that evokes low arousal emotions (sadness) is less viral (Berger and Milkman, 2012). Given that the tendency to express both positive and negative feelings and emotions in spoken conversations is a feature of extraversion (Mairesse et al., 2007), and that literature in psychology links the tendency to speak a lot to extraversion (Gill and Oberlander, 2002), observed neuroticism (Mairesse et al., 2007) and dominance (Bee et al., 2010). we suggest that the correlation between long turns in meetings and highly shared contents in Facebook may be due to extraversion, dominance and high self-esteem. We are going to release the dataset we collected on demand.