From sunblock to softblock: Analyzing the correlates of neology in published writing and on social media
This work addresses how language evolution differs between formal and informal contexts, providing insights for linguists and computational researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methodology.
The study investigated factors influencing the creation of new words (neology) by extending prior methods to analyze both published texts and Twitter posts, finding that similar factors apply across domains but with a weaker effect of topic popularity growth on social media.
Living languages are shaped by a host of conflicting internal and external evolutionary pressures. While some of these pressures are universal across languages and cultures, others differ depending on the social and conversational context: language use in newspapers is subject to very different constraints than language use on social media. Prior distributional semantic work on English word emergence (neology) identified two factors correlated with creation of new words by analyzing a corpus consisting primarily of historical published texts (Ryskina et al., 2020, arXiv:2001.07740). Extending this methodology to contextual embeddings in addition to static ones and applying it to a new corpus of Twitter posts, we show that the same findings hold for both domains, though the topic popularity growth factor may contribute less to neology on Twitter than in published writing. We hypothesize that this difference can be explained by the two domains favouring different neologism formation mechanisms.