Rob Voigt

Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect

Significance Police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops, even after controlling for officer race, infraction severity, stop location, and stop outcome. This paper presents a systematic analysis of officer body-worn camera footage, using computational linguistic techniques to automatically measure the respect level that officers display to community members. This work demonstrates that body camera footage can be used as a rich source of data rather than merely archival evidence, and paves the way for developing powerful language-based tools for studying and potentially improving police–community relations. Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police–community trust.

Between- and Within-Speaker Effects of Bilingualism on F0 Variation.

To what extent is prosody shaped by cultural and social factors? Existing research has shown that an individual bilingual speaker exhibits differences in framing, ideology, and personality when speaking their two languages. To understand whether these differences extend to prosody we study F0 variation in a corpus of interviews with German-Italian and German-French bilingual speakers. We find two primary effects. First, a betweenspeaker effect: these two groups of bilinguals make different use of F0 even when they are all speaking German. Second, a within-speaker effect: bilinguals use F0 differently depending on which language they are speaking, differences that are consistent across speakers. These effects are modulated strongly by gender, suggesting that language-specific social positioning may play a central role. These results have important implications for our understanding of bilingualism and cross-cultural linguistic difference in general. Prosody appears to be a moving target rather than a stable feature, as speakers use prosodic variation to position themselves on cultural and social axes like linguistic context and gender.

The Users Who Say 'Ni': Audience Identification in Chinese-language Restaurant Reviews

We give an algorithm for disambiguating generic versus referential uses of secondperson pronouns in restaurant reviews in Chinese. Reviews in this domain use the ‘you’ pronoun 你 either generically or to refer to shopkeepers, readers, or for selfreference in reported conversation. We first show that linguistic features of the local context (drawn from prior literature) help in disambigation. We then show that document-level features (n-grams and document-level embeddings)— not previously used in the referentiality literature— actually give the largest gain in performance, and suggest this is because pronouns in this domain exhibit ‘one-senseper-discourse’. Our work highlights an important case of discourse effects on pronoun use, and may suggest practical implications for audience extraction and other sentiment tasks in online reviews.