Abstract
The paper presents approaches for identifying real-world demographic attributes based on language use in the virtual world. We apply features developed from the classic literature on sociolinguistics and sound symbolism to data collected from virtual-world chat and avatar naming to determine participants’ age and gender. We also examine participants’ use of avatar names across virtual worlds and how these names are employed to project a consistent identity across environments, which we call “traveling characteristics.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Wang, W., et al.: Automatic Detection of Speaker Attributes Based on Utterance Text. Interspeech 2011, Florence, Italy (October 2011)
Lawson, A., et al.: Sociolinguistic Factors and Gender Mapping Across Real and Virtual World Cultures. 2nd International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making, San Francisco, CA (July 2012)
Lawson, A., Taylor, N.: The Names People Play: Exploring MMOG Players’ Avatar Naming Conventions. Canadian Games Studies Association Symposium (May 2012)
Lakoff, R.T.: Language and Woman’s Place. Harper & Row, New York (1975)
Tannen, D.: Gender and Discourse. Oxford University Press, New York (1994)
Tannen, D.: Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Ablex, Norwood (1984)
Herring, S.C., Paolillo, J.C.: Gender and genre variation in weblogs. J. Socioling.10(4):439–459 (2006)
Herring, S.: Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier. American Library Association Annual Convention, Miami (1994)
Gordon, M., Heath, J.: Sex, sound symbolism, and sociolinguistics. Curr. Anthropol.39(4, August/October):421–449 (1998)
Jespersen, O.: Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. Allen and Unwin, London (1922)
Ohala, J., Hinton, L., Nichols, J.: Sound Symbolism. Cambridge University Press, New York (1994)
Pearce, C.: Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. MIT Press, Cambridge (2009)
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base for sponsorship of this research under contract FA8650-10-C-7009.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lawson, A., Murray, J. (2014). Identifying User Demographic Traits Through Virtual-World Language Use. In: Ahmad, M., Shen, C., Srivastava, J., Contractor, N. (eds) Predicting Real World Behaviors from Virtual World Data. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07142-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07142-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07141-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07142-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)