Title:
Identifying regional dialects in online social media
Identifying regional dialects in online social media
Author(s)
Eisenstein, Jacob
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Abstract
Electronic social media offers new opportunities for informal communication in written language, while
at the same time, providing new datasets that allow researchers to document dialect variation from records
of natural communication among millions of individuals. The unprecedented scale of this data enables
the application of quantitative methods to automatically discover the lexical variables that distinguish the
language of geographical areas such as cities. This can be paired with the segmentation of geographical space
into dialect regions, within the context of a single joint statistical model | thus simultaneously identifying
coherent dialect regions and the words that distinguish them. Finally, a diachronic analysis reveals rapid
changes in the geographical distribution of these lexical features, suggesting that statistical analysis of social
media may offer new insights on the diffusion of lexical change.
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Date Issued
2014-08-06
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Text
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Book Chapter