Related papers: Semantic Variation in Online Communities of Practi…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
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…
We analyze gendered communities defined in three different ways: text, users, and sentiment. Differences across these representations reveal facets of communities' distinctive identities, such as social group, topic, and attitudes. Two…
We present the first exploration of meaning shift over short periods of time in online communities using distributional representations. We create a small annotated dataset and use it to assess the performance of a standard model for…
The semantics used for particular terms in an academic field organically evolve over time. Tracking this evolution through inspection of published literature has either been from the perspective of Linguistic scholars or has concentrated…
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present…
Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning…
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…
With the proliferation of network data, researchers are increasingly focusing on questions investigating phenomena occurring on networks. This often includes analysis of peer-effects, i.e., how the connections of an individual affect that…
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…
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…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
We investigate the birth and diffusion of lexical innovations in a large dataset of online social communities. We build on sociolinguistic theories and focus on the relation between the spread of a novel term and the social role of the…
A systematic way of defining variants of a modeling language is useful for adapting the language to domain or project specific needs. Variants can be obtained by adapting the syntax or semantics of the language. In this paper, we take a…
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…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a…
A systematic way of defining variants of a modeling language is useful for adopting the language to domain or project specific needs. Variants can be obtained by adopting the syntax or semantics of the language. In this paper, we take a…
Semantic feature models have become a popular tool for prediction and interpretation of fMRI data. In particular, prior work has shown that differences in the fMRI patterns in sentence reading can be explained by context-dependent changes…