S tylistic approaches to predicting R eddit popularity in diglossia (2021)

Abstract: Past work investigating what makes a Reddit post popular has indicated that style is a far better predictor than content, where posts conforming to a subreddit’s community style are better received. However, what about a diglossia, when there are two community styles? In Singapore, the basilect (‘Singlish’) co-exists with an acrolect (standard English), each with contrasting advantages of community identity and prestige respectively. In this paper, I apply stylistic approaches to predicting Reddit post scores in a diglossia. Using data from the Singaporean and British subreddits, I show that while the acrolect’s prestige attracts more upvotes, the most popular posts also draw on Singlish vocabulary to appeal to the community identity.

## introduction reddit is a popular social media platform which is organized into different sub-forums, called subreddits. users can submit original content as top-level posts to each subreddit, which other users can then comment on and either up-or down-vote. the most popular posts earn tens of thousands of upvotes. but what exactly makes a post popular? in this paper, i apply natural language processing (nlp) techniques to predicting the popularity of a reddit post. as past research has found style to be a strong predictor of community response @xcite , i focus on stylistic approaches using punctuation, stopwords and part-of-speech tags, as inspired by @xcite . in particular, i investigate how community style endorsement @xcite applies in diglossic singapore. linguists have observed that singapore english is organized along a sociolect continuum from an informal basilect (singlish), to a formal acrolect, which has minimal features of singlish and is essentially standard british english @xcite . use of the acrolect is generally associated with better education, and therefore higher socioeconomic status. on the other hand, despite top-down efforts from the singaporean government, the basilect is the dialect used by the average singaporean in everyday situations, and is closely associated with the singaporean identity. in fact, singaporean politicians intentionally include singlish phrases in election speeches in efforts to appear more down-to-earth and likeable. with competing appeals of identity and prestige between the two, i find that the most popular posts similarly use basilectal lexicon together with the acrolect to achieve the 'best of both worlds'. ## related work much research has gone into investigating what makes a social media post popular, including some specifically focused on reddit. @xcite controlled for the content of the post by concentrating on image submissions, which are frequently re-or cross-posted to different communities by different authors. they found that the title of a submission played a role in determining its success, where titles specifically engineered towards the community it was posted in (for example, by using community-specific words) performed better. @xcite took this a step further and trained separate models for the content (using latent dirichlet allocation (lda)) and the style of the language used (by replacing topic words with their part-of-speech tags). they computed the spearman rank correlation between scores and post representations, and found that the style model was much better at predicting of the success of a post than the content model. in other words, they found that these subreddits had their own community style, and posts which are stylisti-cally more similar to it are more likely to be wellreceived. fang et al. ( 2016 ) is the paper which is closest to the aim of this paper. they divided posts into eight different bins which are automatically determined by the score distribution of that particular subreddit, and evaluated model performance using a modified macro f1 score (details in section 5.1). however, while @xcite focused on modelling the conversational context of a post, i instead focus on modelling the community style. i take cues from @xcite to achieve this. they grouped their features into three broad categories: word (bag-of-words), style, and syntax features. for style features, they defined style words to be punctuation, stop-words, or latin abbreviations, and replaced all non-style words with their part-of-speech (pos) tags. meta-features such as average word and sentence lengths were also used. for grammatical features, they included a feature for every unique context free grammar and tree substitution grammar rule, as well as charniak and johnson re-ranking features @xcite . these are parse tree features initially used for re-ranking parser output, and include aggregate features for conjunct parallelism and lexicalized features for sub-trees and head-tohead dependencies. ## future work in the future, i would like to extend this work by including context-free grammar (cfg) features using corenlp to compare the use of singlish grammatical features, in order to further confirm or disprove the theory that the most popular posts use the acrolect, i.e. the least grammatical features from singlish, despite having the highest prevalence of singlish terms. ## conclusion in summary, in this paper, i look at the linguistic factors that predict the community response of reddit posts. i collected data from two reddit subforums, the singaporean and uk subreddits. following @xcite , i extracted three types of features, broadly grouped as grammatical, stylistic and content features. the models generally show good results, with the stylistic and grammatical models performing comparable to state-of-the-art bert embeddings. i investigate also the hypothesis that posts conforming to a group's style receive greater community endorsement @xcite . i show that in a diglossic situation, although the acrolect draws greater prestige, the most successful posts draw on features from the basilect in order to connect with the audience.