Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter
Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009–D...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Online |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science
2013
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3814942/ |
| Summary: | Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009–December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words. |
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