Why do some things succeed in the marketplace of ideas? While some argue that content drives success, others suggest that style, or the way ideas are presented, also plays an important role. To provide a stringent test of style's importance, we examine it in a context where content should be paramount: academic research. While scientists often see writing as a disinterested way to communicate unobstructed truth, a multi-method investigation indicates that writing style shapes impact. Separating style from content can be difficult as papers that tend to use certain language may also write about certain topics. Consequently, we focus on a unique class of words linked to style (i.e., function words such as "and," "the," and "on") that are completely devoid of content. Natural language processing of almost 30,000 articles from a range of disciplines finds that function words explain 13-27% of language's impact on citations. Ancillary analyses explore specific categories of function words to suggest how style matters, highlighting the role of writing simplicity, personal voice, and temporal perspective. Experiments further underscore the causal impact of style. The results suggest how to boost communication's impact and highlight the value of natural language processing for understanding the success of ideas.
Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation
Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）；Information Science Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Beijing Institute of Big Data Research（北京大数据研究院）
The Effect of Different Writing Tasks on Linguistic Style: A Case Study of the ROC Story Cloze Task
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
一个作家的风格不仅取决于个人特质，还取决于她的意图和精神状态。在本文中，我们展示了如何相同的写作任务的变体可以导致可测量的写作风格的差异。我们提出了一个基于故事完形填空任务的案例研究（Mostafazadeh et al.，2016 a），其中注释者被分配了具有不同约束的类似写作任务：（1）编写整个故事，（2）为给定的故事上下文添加故事结局，以及（3）为故事添加不连贯的结局。我们表明，一个简单的线性分类通知文体特征是能够成功区分这三种情况下，甚至不看的故事背景。此外，将我们的文体特征与语言模型预测相结合，达到了故事完形填空的最佳表现。我们的研究结果表明，不同的任务框架可以显着影响人们的写作方式。
