10,224 research outputs found
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
Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends
Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common
interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we
explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a
typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and
'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a
long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of
categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of
trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward
language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to
categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient
way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data,
enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to
quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among
others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with
each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many
were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating
from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013
(American Society for Information Science and Technology
Google matrix analysis of directed networks
In past ten years, modern societies developed enormous communication and
social networks. Their classification and information retrieval processing
become a formidable task for the society. Due to the rapid growth of World Wide
Web, social and communication networks, new mathematical methods have been
invented to characterize the properties of these networks on a more detailed
and precise level. Various search engines are essentially using such methods.
It is highly important to develop new tools to classify and rank enormous
amount of network information in a way adapted to internal network structures
and characteristics. This review describes the Google matrix analysis of
directed complex networks demonstrating its efficiency on various examples
including World Wide Web, Wikipedia, software architecture, world trade, social
and citation networks, brain neural networks, DNA sequences and Ulam networks.
The analytical and numerical matrix methods used in this analysis originate
from the fields of Markov chains, quantum chaos and Random Matrix theory.Comment: 56 pages, 58 figures. Missed link added in network example of Fig3
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An analysis of UK Policing Engagement via Social Media
Police forces in the UK make use of social media to communicate and engage with the public. However, while guidance reports claim that social media can enhance the accessibility of policing organisations, research studies have shown that exchanges between the citizens and the police tend to be infrequent. Social media usually act as an extra channel for delivering messages, but not as a mean for enabling a deeper engagement with the public. This has led to a phenomena where police officers and staff started to use social media in a personal capacity in the aim of getting closer to the public. In this paper, we aim to understand what attracts citizens to engage with social media policing content, from corporate as well as from non-corporate accounts. Our approach combines learnings from existing theories and studies on user engagement as well as from the analysis of 1.5 Million posts from 48 corporate and 2,450 non-corporate Twitter police accounts. Our results provide police-specific guidelines on how to improve communication to increase public engagement and participation
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