# You Write Like You Eat: Stylistic variation as a predictor of social stratification

## TL;DR

This paper develops neural models to predict social stratification from social media writing style, highlighting morpho-syntactic features as key indicators of socio-economic status over lexical features.

## Contribution

It introduces a neural approach that emphasizes morpho-syntactic stylistic features for social status prediction, contrasting with lexical feature-based topic prediction.

## Key findings

- Morpho-syntactic features outperform lexical features in predicting socio-economic status.
- Neural models can effectively classify social stratification based on stylistic cues.
- Stylistic variation correlates strongly with social stratification, supporting Labov's theory.

## Abstract

Inspired by Labov's seminal work on stylistic variation as a function of social stratification, we develop and compare neural models that predict a person's presumed socio-economic status, obtained through distant supervision,from their writing style on social media. The focus of our work is on identifying the most important stylistic parameters to predict socio-economic group. In particular, we show the effectiveness of morpho-syntactic features as stylistic predictors of socio-economic group,in contrast to lexical features, which are good predictors of topic.