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The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…
We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
The architecture of public discourse has been profoundly reshaped by social media platforms, which mediate interactions at an unprecedented scale and complexity. This study analyzes user behavior across six platforms over 33 years,…
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
Broad topics in online platforms represent a type of meso-scale between individual user-defined communities and the whole platform; they typically consist of related communities that address different facets of a shared topic. Users often…
In this paper we propose some new measures of language development using network analyses, which is inspired by the recent surge of interests in network studies of many real-world systems. Children's and care-takers' speech data from a…
Research from a variety of fields including psychology and linguistics have found correlations and patterns in personal attributes and behavior, but efforts to understand the broader heterogeneity in human behavior have not yet integrated…
We investigate the birth and diffusion of lexical innovations in a large dataset of online social communities. We build on sociolinguistic theories and focus on the relation between the spread of a novel term and the social role of the…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…
Many models have been proposed to analyze the evolution of opinion structure due to the interaction of individuals in their social environment. Such models analyze the spreading of ideas both in completely interacting backgrounds and on…