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Creating and Using a Correlated Corpus to Glean Communicative Commonalities

This paper describes a collection of correlated communicative samples collected from the same individuals across six diverse genres. Three of the genres were computer mediated: email, blog, and chat, and three non-computer-mediated: essay, interview, and discussion. Participants were drawn from a college student population with an equal number of males and females recruited. All communication expressed opinion on six pre-selected, current topics that had been determined to stimulate communication. The experimental design including methods of collection, randomization of scheduling of genre order and topic order is described. Preliminary results for two descriptive metrics, word count and Flesch readability, are presented. Interesting and, in some cases, significant effects were observed across genres by topic and by gender of participant. This corpus will provide a resource to investigate communication stylistics of individuals across genres, the identification of individuals from correlated data, as well as commonalities and differences across samples that agree in genre, topic, and/or gender of participant.