Related papers: Language, Place, and Social Media: Geographic Dial…
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…
This paper describes a preliminary study on the comparative linguistic ecology of online spaces (i.e., social media language data) and real-world spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand (i.e., subnational administrative areas). We compare measures…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Though dialectal language is increasingly abundant on social media, few resources exist for developing NLP tools to handle such language. We conduct a case study of dialectal language in online conversational text by investigating…
The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of…
We present a data-driven approach using word embeddings to discover and categorise language biases on the discussion platform Reddit. As spaces for isolated user communities, platforms such as Reddit are increasingly connected to issues of…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Social media research on mental health has focused predominantly on detecting and diagnosing conditions at the individual level. In this work, we shift attention to \emph{intergroup} behavior, examining how two prominent neurodivergent…
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…
Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of recent papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word…
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…
Research from a variety of fields including psychology and linguistics have found correlations and patterns in personal attributes and behavior, but efforts to understand the broader heterogeneity in human behavior have not yet integrated…
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…
Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic aspect. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic aspects in social media,…
This paper evaluates large georeferenced corpora, taken from both web-crawled and social media sources, against ground-truth population and language-census datasets. The goal is to determine (i) which dataset best represents population…