Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

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 a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Social Network Mixing Patterns in Mergers and Acquisitions-A Simulation Experiment

In the contemporary world of global business and continuously growing competition, organizations tend to use mergers and acquisitions to enforce their position on the market. The future organization’s design is a critical success factor in such undertakings. The field of social network analysis can enhance our uderstanding of these processes as it lets us reason about the development of networks, regardless of their origin. The analysis of mixing patterns is particularly useful as it provides an insight into how nodes in a network connect with each other. We hypothesize that organizational networks with compatible mixing patterns will be integrated more successfully. After conducting a simulation experiment, we suggest an integration model based on the analysis of network assortativity. The model can be a guideline for organizational integration, such as occurs in mergers and acquisitions.mergers & acquisition, social network,analysis, mixing patterns, assortativity, organizational design

Sybil attacks against mobile users: friends and foes to the rescue

Collaborative applications for co-located mobile users can be severely disrupted by a sybil attack to the point of being unusable. Existing decentralized defences have largely been designed for peer-to-peer networks but not for mobile networks. That is why we propose a new decentralized defence for portable devices and call it MobID. The idea is that a device manages two small networks in which it stores information about the devices it meets: its network of friends contains honest devices, and its network of foes contains suspicious devices. By reasoning on these two networks, the device is then able to determine whether an unknown individual is carrying out a sybil attack or not. We evaluate the extent to which MobID reduces the number of interactions with sybil attackers and consequently enables collaborative applications.We do so using real mobility and social network data. We also assess computational and communication costs of MobID on mobile phones