Towards a model of formal and informal address in English Manaal Faruqui Sebastian Padó Computer Science and Engineering Institute of Computational Linguistics Indian Institute of Technology Heidelberg University Kharagpur, India Heidelberg, Germany
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract information about formality, e.g. the extraction of social relationships or, notably, machine transla- Informal and formal (“T/V”) address in dia- tion from English into languages with a T/V dis- logue is not distinguished overtly in mod- tinction which involves a pronoun choice. ern English, e.g. by pronoun choice like In this paper, we investigate the possibility to in many other languages such as French recover the T/V distinction for (monolingual) sen- (“tu”/“vous”). Our study investigates the status of the T/V distinction in English liter- tences of 19th and 20th-century English such as: ary texts. Our main findings are: (a) human (1) Can I help you, Sir? (V) raters can label monolingual English utter- (2) You are my best friend! (T) ances as T or V fairly well, given sufficient context; (b), a bilingual corpus can be ex- After describing the creation of an English corpus ploited to induce a supervised classifier for of T/V labels via annotation projection (Section 3), T/V without human annotation. It assigns we present an annotation study (Section 4) which T/V at sentence level with up to 68% accu- racy, relying mainly on lexical features; (c), establishes that taggers can indeed assign T/V la- there is a marked asymmetry between lex- bels to monolingual English utterances in context ical features for formal speech (which are fairly reliably.