I'M A Belieber: Social Roles Via Self-Identification And Conceptual Attributes

Motivated by work predicting coarse-grained author categories in social media, such as gender or political preference, we explore whether Twitter contains information to support the prediction of fine-grained categories, or social roles. We find that the simple self-identification pattern "I am a _" supports significantly richer classification than previously explored, successfully retrieving a variety of fine-grained roles. For a given role (e.g., writer), we can further identify characteristic attributes using a simple possessive construction (e.g., writer's _). Tweets that incorporate the attribute terms in first person possessives (my _) are confirmed to be an indicator that the author holds the associated social role.