The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change

Jian Zhu, David Jurgens


Abstract
New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community’s lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community’s network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters, and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical leveling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.178
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2201–2218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.178
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.178
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jian Zhu and David Jurgens. 2021. The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 2201–2218, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change (Zhu & Jurgens, NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.178.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.178.mp4
Code
 lingjzhu/reddit_network