M. Faruqui and S. Pado: ``I thou thee, thou traitor'': Predicting formal vs. informal address in English literature. ACL 2011, Portland.

In contrast to many languages (like Russian or French), modern English does not distinguish formal and informal ("T/V") address overtly, for example by pronoun choice. We describe an ongoing study which investigates to what degree the T/V distinction is recoverable in English text, and with what textual features it correlates. Our findings are: (a) human raters can label English utterances as T or V fairly well, given sufficient context; (b), lexical cues can predict T/V almost at human level. 

@InProceedings{faruqui-pado:2011:ACL-HLT2011,
  author    = {Faruqui, Manaal  and  Pad\'{o}, Sebastian},
  title     = {``I Thou Thee, Thou Traitor'': Predicting Formal vs. 
               Informal Address in English Literature},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association 
               for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2011},
  address   = {Portland, Oregon, USA},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {467--472},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-2082}
}