Papers by Suzanne Stevenson
Style-Shifting Behaviour of the Manosphere on Reddit (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hate speech groups (HSGs) may negatively influence online platforms through their distinctive language, which may affect the tone and topic of discussion in other spaces if spread beyond the HSGs. |
| Approach: | They explore the linguistic style of the Manosphere on reddit and how it reflects their linguistic styles across communities. |
| Outcome: | The linguistic style of the Manosphere on Reddit is studied to determine whether it is harmful to health and community health. |
Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Language ideologies are evaluative ideas or beliefs about language, such as ideas about what is "correct", "natural" or "articulate". |
| Approach: | They use gender-neutral variants more often when more explicit metalinguistic context is provided. |
| Outcome: | The findings show that language ideologies in LLMs can vary, which may be unexpected to users. |
CodeSwitch-Reddit: Exploration of Written Multilingual Discourse in Online Discussion Forums (D19-55)
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| Challenge: | a dataset of written multilingual productions is released to explore the sociolinguistic underpinnings of written code-switching . |
| Approach: | They use a reddit discussion platform to collect written code-switched productions . they examine whether oral code-witching findings are carried over to written code . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can facilitate a range of research and practical activities. |
CodeSwitch-Reddit: Exploration of Written Multilingual Discourse in Online Discussion Forums (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a dataset of written code-switched productions is curated from topical threads of multiple bilingual communities on the Reddit discussion platform. |
| Approach: | They analyze a dataset of written code-switched productions curated from multiple bilingual communities on the reddit discussion platform and examine whether findings are carried over to written codeswitching in discussion forums. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can facilitate a range of research and practical activities. |
Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on gender-linked language have established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. |
| Approach: | They compile a corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated with speakers’ gender and perform an empirical study of gender differences in the usage of figurative language between male and female authors. |
| Outcome: | The results show that gender-specific idiomatic choices reflect gender-based lexical and semantic preferences in general language, men's and women's idioms express higher emotion than their literal language, and contextual analysis of idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles and semantic biases. |
What social attitudes about gender does BERT encode? Leveraging insights from psycholinguistics (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Much research has focused on evaluating whether large language models encode stereotypical/harmful associations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two datasets from human experiments to examine how word preferences in a large language model reflect social attitudes about gender. |
| Outcome: | The language model BERT takes into account factors that shape human lexical choice of such language, but may not weigh those factors in the same way people do. |
A Formidable Ability: Detecting Adjectival Extremeness with DSMs (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on distributional semantic models capture abstract semantic properties across domains . abstract properties can form the basis for abstract semantic classes . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distributional semantic models to capture cross-domain properties . they use extremeness to model emergence of intensifier meaning in adverbs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture extremeness and intensifier meaning in adverbs. |
Analyzing values about gendered language reform in LLMs’ revisions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In the past years, LLMs have been used in everyday tasks, especially the formulation and revision of text. |
| Approach: | They examine LLMs' revision of gendered role nouns and their justifications using a prompt set-up to examine their alignment with feminist and trans-inclusive language reforms for English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed revision choices are based on the literature and empirical evidence. |
Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on lexical decline suggest that cognitive and linguistic factors play a role in the survival of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. |
| Approach: | They propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors that are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed factors show significant differences in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. |
Investigating Online Community Engagement through Stancetaking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale computational work on stancetaking has explored community similarities in their preferences for stance markers without considering the stance-relevant properties of the contexts in which stance marker use is carried out. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stance-relevant properties of Reddit communities to capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representations capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures and relate them to broader inter- and intra-community engagement patterns. |