@inproceedings{henriksson-etal-2026-register,
    title = "Register Mixing Is the Norm on the Web",
    author = "Henriksson, Erik  and
      Razzaghi, Alireza  and
      Lundberg, Tuomas  and
      Kanner, Antti  and
      Laippala, Veronika",
    editor = {Hamilton, Sil  and
      {\"O}hman, Emily  and
      Hicke, Rebecca M. M.  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Bax, Axel  and
      Matthews, Jacob A.  and
      H{\"a}m{\"a}l{\"a}inen, Mika},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.nlp4dh-1.14/",
    pages = "138--149",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-427-9",
    abstract = "Nearly all studies on web registers{---}online text varieties associated with characteristic social contexts and linguistic features{---}use full documents as the unit of analysis. However, web documents often contain sections in different registers. A cooking blog, for instance, may combine personal storytelling, recipe instructions, user comments, and promotional text within a single URL. This internal variation raises doubts about the validity of document level register labeling. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based approach that identifies register homogeneous segments within documents and apply it to a 10,000-document English sample from HPLT 3.0. We show that segmentation addresses persistent problems in register analysis, including low inter-annotator agreement and category fuzziness. Strikingly, it also reveals that most web documents contain more than one register, making register mixing the norm rather than the exception on the web."
}