Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter

Christian M Alis and May T Lim

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 10, 1-9

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0077793 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 77793&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0077793

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0077793

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().