@inproceedings{ryskina-etal-2026-sunblock,
    title = "From sunblock to softblock: Analyzing the correlates of neology in published writing and on social media",
    author = "Ryskina, Maria  and
      Gormley, Matthew R.  and
      Mahowald, Kyle  and
      Mortensen, David R.  and
      Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor  and
      Kulkarni, Vivek",
    editor = "Tahmasebi, Nina  and
      Cassotti, Pierluigi  and
      Montariol, Syrielle  and
      Kutuzov, Andrey  and
      Huebscher, Netta  and
      Spaziani, Elena  and
      Baes, Naomi",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Change ({LC}hange{'}26)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.lchange-1.14/",
    pages = "162--180",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-362-3",
    abstract = "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)](https://aclanthology.org/2020.scil-1.43/). 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 word formation mechanisms."
}