Our paper this week is Echoes of Power: Language Effects and Power Differences in Social Interaction  which explores how to identify power differences between people in a domain independent way. http://www.mpi-sws.org/~cristian/Echoes_of_power_files/echoes_of_power.pdf.

The central thought is that the way in which one person "coordinates" their linguistic style to the style of the person or group with which they are communicating can be an indicator of the power relationship between them. If this is true for open source software as well as for the Wikipedia and Supreme Court corpa they explore, it can be exploited to create a power hierarchy in these open source projects. With a graph of the power network it may be possible to infer project outcomes based on various network metrics of that power network.

This paper also makes me wonder to what extent it could be extended to code style. The references suggest that they are building on some other work that finds a prose style that is characteristic for an individual. Given the high level of semantics in the tokens and rigid syntax in a computer program is it even possible to find some domain independent marker of programmer style? I know this has been extensively explored and this paper makes me more curious to see what has already been found.