Fernando Dı́az

Shaily Bhatt, Supriti Vijay, Jeremiah Milbauer et al.

The global use of artificial intelligence has increased interest in assessing the ability to generate culturally localized content, including stories. Cultural localization in stories often occurs through either templated localization -- the use of cultural markers (e.g., names, locations) in a generic narrative -- or holistic localization -- the variation of plots, values, and themes, in addition to cultural markers. We propose a method to measure the degree to which content was generated through templated localization. Specifically, we identify the lexical tokens that distinguish stories across nationalities and measure the similarity of the narratives that remain after removing them. In stories generated by five models on 125 topics for 193 nationalities, our method is able to detect that only a small subset (9-17%) of the vocabulary accounts for the variation across nationalities and that the narratives that remain after removing them contain repeated multi-word sequences, suggesting the presence of a shared culturally-agnostic narrative template. Finally, we characterize the cultural markers for their stereotypicality and offensiveness, finding that markers from 19 countries, mostly located in the Global South, are on average offensive.

Rahul Goel, Sandeep Soni, Naman Goyal et al.

Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on circumstantial evidence, estimating the direction of change from differences between older and younger speakers. In this paper, we use a data set of several million Twitter users to track language changes in progress. First, we show that language change can be viewed as a form of social influence: we observe complex contagion for phonetic spellings and "netspeak" abbreviations (e.g., lol), but not for older dialect markers from spoken language. Next, we test whether specific types of social network connections are more influential than others, using a parametric Hawkes process model. We find that tie strength plays an important role: densely embedded social ties are significantly better conduits of linguistic influence. Geographic locality appears to play a more limited role: we find relatively little evidence to support the hypothesis that individuals are more influenced by geographically local social ties, even in their usage of geographical dialect markers.