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Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
A comprehensive understanding of data quality is the cornerstone of measurement studies in social media research. This paper presents in-depth measurements on the effects of Twitter data sampling across different timescales and different…
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from…
Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration we aim to quantitatively study inter- and intra-regional communication for the first time. This work uses social media posts to first identify…
Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within…
We present a new computational technique to detect and analyze statistically significant geographic variation in language. Our meta-analysis approach captures statistical properties of word usage across geographical regions and uses…
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…
Parents and teachers often express concern about the extensive use of social media by youngsters. Some of them see emoticons, undecipherable initialisms and loose grammar typical for social media as evidence of language degradation. In this…
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages…
Stretched words like `heellllp' or `heyyyyy' are a regular feature of spoken language, often used to emphasize or exaggerate the underlying meaning of the root word. While stretched words are rarely found in formal written language and…
Modern society habitually uses online social media services to publicly share observations, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs at any time and from any location. These geotagged social media posts may provide aggregate insights into people's…
Social media platforms such as Twitter (now known as X) have revolutionized how the public engage with important societal and political topics. Recently, climate change discussions on social media became a catalyst for political…
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…
This paper presents a multilingual study on, per single post of microblog text, (a) how much can be said, (b) how much is written in terms of characters and bytes, and (c) how much is said in terms of information content in posts by…
Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between…
The election forecasting 'industry' is a growing one, both in the volume of scholars producing forecasts and methodological diversity. In recent years a new approach has emerged that relies on social media and particularly Twitter data to…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
With the growth of social media usage, social activists try to leverage this platform to raise the awareness related to a social issue and engage the public worldwide. The broad use of social media platforms in recent years, made it easier…
The many-to-many social communication activity on the popular technology-news website Slashdot has been studied. We have concentrated on the dynamics of message production without considering semantic relations and have found regular…