  Empowering language is important in many real-world contexts, from education
to workplace dynamics to healthcare. Though language technologies are growing
more prevalent in these contexts, empowerment has seldom been studied in NLP,
and moreover, it is inherently challenging to operationalize because of its
implicit nature. This work builds from linguistic and social psychology
literature to explore what characterizes empowering language. We then
crowdsource a novel dataset of Reddit posts labeled for empowerment, reasons
why these posts are empowering to readers, and the social relationships between
posters and readers. Our preliminary analyses show that this dataset, which we
call TalkUp, can be used to train language models that capture empowering and
disempowering language. More broadly, TalkUp provides an avenue to explore
implication, presuppositions, and how social context influences the meaning of
language.
