2015/09/16 by Suman Maity, Bhadreswar Ghuku, Maity, Suman Kalyan +6
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Authorship Attribution and Profiling #Digital Communication and Language #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language and cultural evolution #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1509.05096
openalex publication_date 2015/09/16 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Twitter is one of the most popular social media. Due to the ease of\navailability of data, Twitter is used significantly for research purposes.\nTwitter is known to evolve in many aspects from what it was at its birth;\nnevertheless, how it evolved its own linguistic style is still relatively\nunknown. In this paper, we study the evolution of various sociolinguistic\naspects of Twitter over large time scales. To the best of our knowledge, this\nis the first comprehensive study on the evolution of such aspects of this OSN.\nWe performed quantitative analysis both on the word level as well as on the\nhashtags since it is perhaps one of the most important linguistic units of this\nsocial media. We studied the (in)formality aspects of the linguistic styles in\nTwitter and find that it is neither fully formal nor completely informal; while\non one hand, we observe that Out-Of-Vocabulary words are decreasing over time\n(pointing to a formal style), on the other hand it is quite evident that\nwhitespace usage is getting reduced with a huge prevalence of running texts\n(pointing to an informal style). We also analyze and propose quantitative\nreasons for repetition and coalescing of hashtags in Twitter. We believe that\nsuch phenomena may be strongly tied to different evolutionary aspects of human\nlanguages.\n