Understanding how social power structures affect the way we interact with one
another is of great interest to social scientists who want to answer
fundamental questions about human behavior, as well as to computer scientists
who want to build automatic methods to infer the social contexts of
interactions. In this paper, we employ advancements in extra-propositional
semantics extraction within NLP to study how author commitment reflects the
social context of an interaction. Specifically, we investigate whether the
level of commitment expressed by individuals in an organizational interaction
reflects the hierarchical power structures they are part of. We find that
subordinates use significantly more instances of non-commitment than superiors.
More importantly, we also find that subordinates attribute propositions to
other agents more often than superiors do --- an aspect that has not been
studied before. Finally, we show that enriching lexical features with
commitment labels captures important distinctions in social meanings.

使用 NLP 的 extra-propositional semantics extraction 技术，研究作者表达的承诺对于组织层级结构的反映，发现下属使用非承诺性语言的情况显著大于上级，且下属更倾向于归因于其他代理人。同时推断出，使用承诺标签丰富词汇特征可以捕捉到重要的社交含义区别。