Linguistic Characteristics of Censorable Language on SinaWeibo

Authors

Kei Yin Ng, Montclair State UniversityFollow
Anna Feldman, Montclair State UniversityFollow
Jing Peng, Montclair State UniversityFollow
Christopher Leberknight, Montclair State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Preprint

Publication Date

2018

Journal / Book Title

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom

Abstract

This paper investigates censorship from a linguistic perspective. We collect a corpus of censored and uncensored posts on a number of topics, build a classifier that predicts censorship decisions independent of discussion topics. Our investigation reveals that the strongest linguistic indicator of censored content of our corpus is its readability.

Journal ISSN / Book ISBN

ISBN 978-1-948087-58-2

Montclair State University Digital Commons Citation

Ng, Kei Yin; Feldman, Anna; Peng, Jing; and Leberknight, Christopher, "Linguistic Characteristics of Censorable Language on SinaWeibo" (2018). Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 3.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/compusci-facpubs/3

Published Citation

Ng Kei Y., Feldman A, & Peng J. and Leberknight, C. 2018. Linguistic Characteristics of Censorable Language on SinaWeibo. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom, pages 12–22, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.