Thursday, February 16, 2012

Email words show power hierarchy

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120214121734.htm

However a new study by Georgia Tech's Eric Gilbert shows that certain words and phrases indeed are reliable indicators of whether workplace emails are sent to someone higher or lower in the corporate hierarchy ...

"Across a wide variety of messages and relationships, these phrases consistently stand out as signaling a power relationship between two people," Gilbert said. "The probability of it occurring due to chance alone is less than 1 in 1,000." ...

That person may not occupy a high box on the org chart, but he or she still has a large amount of influence."

Top 5 Upward Predictors

the ability to
I took
are available
kitchen
thought you would

Top 5 Downward Predictors

have you been
you gave
we are in
title
need in

The project falls in the research field called "applied natural language processing," which has been an important subfield of artificial intelligence for the past 25 years.

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