Related papers: Adaptation of fictional and online conversations t…
Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…
Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their…
Conversation systems accommodate diverse users with unique personalities and distinct writing styles. Within the domain of multi-turn dialogue modeling, this work studies the impact of varied utterance lengths on the quality of subsequent…
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…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of…
Fictional languages have become increasingly popular over the recent years appearing in novels, movies, TV shows, comics, and video games. While some of these fictional languages have a complete vocabulary, most do not. We propose a deep…
People nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world?…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
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…
We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Modalities of communication for human beings are gradually increasing in number with the advent of new forms of technology. Many human beings can readily transition between these different forms of communication with little or no effort,…
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 psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…
Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than…
As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g.,…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…