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We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
The explosion in the availability of natural language data in the era of social media has given rise to a host of applications such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Simultaneously, the growing availability of precise geolocation…
In the last few years, microblogging platforms such as Twitter have given rise to a deluge of textual data that can be used for the analysis of informal communication between millions of individuals. In this work, we propose an…
Quantifying differences in terminologies from various academic domains has been a longstanding problem yet to be solved. We propose a computational approach for analyzing linguistic variation among scientific research fields by capturing…
Statistical linguistics has advanced considerably in recent decades as data has become available. This has allowed researchers to study how statistical properties of languages change over time. In this work, we use data from Twitter to…
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…
Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more…
The task of detecting regionalisms (expressions or words used in certain regions) has traditionally relied on the use of questionnaires and surveys, and has also heavily depended on the expertise and intuition of the surveyor. The irruption…
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…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
Twitter is often used in quantitative studies that identify geographically-preferred topics, writing styles, and entities. These studies rely on either GPS coordinates attached to individual messages, or on the user-supplied location field…
Social Internet content plays an increasingly critical role in many domains, including public health, disaster management, and politics. However, its utility is limited by missing geographic information; for example, fewer than 1.6% of…
Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Variation in language is ubiquitous, particularly in newer forms of writing such as social media. Fortunately, variation is not random, it is often linked to social properties of the author. In this paper, we show how to exploit social…
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…
We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we…
Much work in the space of NLP has used computational methods to explore sociolinguistic variation in text. In this paper, we argue that memes, as multimodal forms of language comprised of visual templates and text, also exhibit meaningful…
Individuals signal aspects of their identity and beliefs through linguistic choices. Studying these choices in aggregate allows us to examine large-scale attitude shifts within a population. Here, we develop computational methods to study…
Several computational models have been developed to detect and analyze dialect variation in recent years. Most of these models assume a predefined set of geographical regions over which they detect and analyze dialectal variation. However,…