Abstract Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature.
Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) …

The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among
people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in …

The present study analyzes the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation, ie the adaptation
of one's language use to that of one's conversation partner. In a large corpus of private …

We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in
Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some …

In conversation, speakers tend to “accommodate” or “align” to their partners, changing the
style and substance of their communications to be more similar to their partners' utterances …

When people talk, they tend to adopt the behaviors, gestures, and language of their
conversational partners. This" accommodation" to one's partners is largely automatic, but the …

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 …

Repetition of linguistic forms is a pervasive coordination mechanism in interactive language
use. In this paper, we investigate patterns of cross-participant repetition in dialogues where …

Variations in language abilities, use, and production style are ubiquitous within any given
population. While research on language evolution has traditionally overlooked the potential …

Massive digital datasets, such as social media data, are a promising source to study social
and cultural phenomena. They provide the opportunity to study language use and behavior …