Related papers: English verb regularization in books and tweets
We examine whether large neural language models, trained on very large collections of varied English text, learn the potentially long-distance dependency of British versus American spelling conventions, i.e., whether spelling is…
Mental health challenges are thought to afflict around 10% of the global population each year, with many going untreated due to stigma and limited access to services. Here, we explore trends in words and phrases related to mental health…
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…
Our paper studies the predictability of online speech -- that is, how well language models learn to model the distribution of user generated content on X (previously Twitter). We define predictability as a measure of the model's…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
The World Wide Web has grown so big, in such an anarchic fashion, that it is difficult to describe. One of the evident intrinsic characteristics of the World Wide Web is its multilinguality. Here, we present a technique for estimating the…
Spanish is one of the most spoken languages in the globe, but not necessarily Spanish is written and spoken in the same way in different countries. Understanding local language variations can help to improve model performances on regional…
This paper measures the stability of cross-linguistic register variation. A register is a variety of a language that is associated with extra-linguistic context. The relationship between a register and its context is functional: the…
Twitter, a popular social media outlet, has evolved into a vast source of linguistic data, rich with opinion, sentiment, and discussion. Due to the increasing popularity of Twitter, its perceived potential for exerting social influence has…
With the growth of social medias, such as Twitter, plenty of user-generated data emerge daily. The short texts published on Twitter -- the tweets -- have earned significant attention as a rich source of information to guide many…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Working adults spend nearly one third of their daily time at their jobs. In this paper, we study job-related social media discourse from a community of users. We use both crowdsourcing and local expertise to train a classifier to detect…
Learning the past tense of English verbs - a seemingly minor aspect of language acquisition - has generated heated debates since 1986, and has become a landmark task for testing the adequacy of cognitive modeling. Several artificial neural…
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…
Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which they are used…
Polarization among US political parties, media and elites is a widely studied topic. Prominent lines of prior research across multiple disciplines have observed and analyzed growing polarization in social media. In this paper, we present a…
We propose generative models for three types of extra-grammatical word formation phenomena abounding in English slang: Blends, Clippings, and Reduplicatives. Adopting a data-driven approach coupled with linguistic knowledge, we propose…
Modern models for common NLP tasks often employ machine learning techniques and train on journalistic, social media, or other culturally-derived text. These have recently been scrutinized for racial and gender biases, rooting from inherent…
We observe and report on a systematic relationship between population density and Twitter use. Number of tweets, number of users and population per unit area are related by power laws, with exponents greater than one, that are consistent…
Social media platforms have grown into an important medium to spread information about an event published by the traditional media, such as news articles. Grouping such diverse sources of information that discuss the same topic in varied…