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Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter

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  • Christian M Alis
  • May T Lim

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Christian M Alis & May T Lim, 2013. "Spatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(10), pages 1-9, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0077793
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0077793
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