Related papers: English verb regularization in books and tweets
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is a crucial indicator of success in life and greater society. It is estimated that 85% of people in juvenile delinquent systems cannot adequately read or write, that more than half of those with…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…
Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides…
Social media networks and chatting platforms often use an informal version of natural text. Adversarial spelling attacks also tend to alter the input text by modifying the characters in the text. Normalizing these texts is an essential step…
We conduct a detailed investigation of correlations between real-time expressions of individuals made across the United States and a wide range of emotional, geographic, demographic, and health characteristics. We do so by combining (1) a…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
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…
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…
A growing literature documents that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is changing scientific writing, yet most studies focus on absolute changes in vocabulary or readability. An important question remains unanswered: Does GenAI use…
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…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
Grammar checking is the task of detection and correction of grammatical errors in the text. English is the dominating language in the field of science and technology. Therefore, the non-native English speakers must be able to use correct…
There is an ongoing debate on whether neural networks can grasp the quasi-regularities in languages like humans. In a typical quasi-regularity task, English past tense inflections, the neural network model has long been criticized that it…
Current benchmark tasks for natural language processing contain text that is qualitatively different from the text used in informal day to day digital communication. This discrepancy has led to severe performance degradation of…
Recent studies suggest social media activity can function as a proxy for measures of state-level public health, detectable through natural language processing. We present results of our efforts to apply this approach to estimate…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
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…