Inducing Lexicons of Formality from Corpora
Tong Wang, Julian Brooke, Graeme Hirst · 2010
The spectrum of formality, in particular lexical formality, has been relatively unexplored compared to related work in sentiment lexicon induction (Turney and Littman, 2003). In this paper, we test in some detail several corpus-based methods for deriving real-valued formality lexicons, and evaluate our lexicons using relative formality judgments between word pairs. The results of our evaluation suggest that the problem is tractable but not trivial, and that we will need both larger corpora and more sophisticated methods to capture the full range of linguistic formality.