Measuring Perceptions of Personhood with Semantic Proto-role Properties

We show that semantic proto-role properties can be used as a tool to measure implicit hu man perceptions of agency and patiency of enti ties in human-generated text.First, we demon strate that silver-generated semantic proto-role property labels are strongly correlated with both human judgment and a probabilistic textbased measure of anthropomorphism.Then, we use our measure to quantify linguistic id iosyncrasies across different AI-related Reddit communities.Our measure shows that subred dits dedicated to discussing AI companionship ascribe higher sentience to "bots" and higher agency to "companies" when compared to other subreddits.This phenomenon reveals not only the unique way in which chatbots are anthro pomorphized in such subreddits, but also the users' keen awareness of their power imbalance with the companies that created the chatbots.Replication package available here.