Related papers: Language statistics at different spatial, temporal…
This paper proposes a methodology for exploring how linguistic behaviour on social media can be used to explore societal reactions to important events such as those that transpired during the SARS CoV2 pandemic. In particular, where spatial…
Social dynamics are shaped by each person's actions, as well as by collective trends that emerge when individuals are brought together. These latter kind of influences escape anyone's control. They are, instead, dominated by aggregate…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
Language is far more than a communication tool. A wealth of information - including but not limited to the identities, psychological states, and social contexts of its users - can be gleaned through linguistic markers, and such insights are…
The limited range in its abscissa of ranked letter frequency distributions causes multiple functions to fit the observed distribution reasonably well. In order to critically compare various functions, we apply the statistical model…
We analyze the dynamic properties of 10^7 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800--2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
A recent increase in data availability has allowed the possibility to perform different statistical linguistic studies. Here we use the Google Books Ngram dataset to analyze word flow among English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. We…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Temporal editing patterns on Wikipedia provide a unique computational lens to explore cultural dynamics across linguistic communities. This study analyses over a decade of editorial activity (2001-2010) across eleven Wikipedia language…
This chapter explores the efficacy of using social media data to examine changing linguistic behaviour of a place. We focus our investigation on Aotearoa New Zealand where official statistics from the census is the only source of language…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Social Media offer a vast amount of geo-located and time-stamped textual content directly generated by people. This information can be analysed to obtain insights about the general state of a large population of users and to address…
Language is a major source of systemic inequities in science, particularly among scholars whose first language is not English. Studies have examined scientists' linguistic practices in specific contexts; few, however, have provided a global…
The movements of ideas and content between locations and languages are unquestionably crucial concerns to researchers of the information age, and Twitter has emerged as a central, global platform on which hundreds of millions of people…
Recent wide-spread adoption of electronic and pervasive technologies has enabled the study of human behavior at an unprecedented level, uncovering universal patterns underlying human activity, mobility, and inter-personal communication. In…
Online communications, and in particular social media, are a key component of how society interacts with and promotes content online. Collective attention on such content can vary wildly. The majority of breaking topics quickly fade into…
This paper investigates the relationship between utterance sentiment and language choice in English-Tamil code-switched text, using methods from machine learning and statistical modelling. We apply a fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa model for…
Language changes over time, including in the hate speech domain, which evolves quickly following social dynamics and cultural shifts. While NLP research has investigated the impact of language evolution on model training and has proposed…
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…