@inproceedings{zhu-jurgens-2021-structure,
    title = "The structure of online social networks modulates the rate of lexical change",
    author = "Zhu, Jian  and
      Jurgens, David",
    editor = "Toutanova, Kristina  and
      Rumshisky, Anna  and
      Zettlemoyer, Luke  and
      Hakkani-Tur, Dilek  and
      Beltagy, Iz  and
      Bethard, Steven  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Zhou, Yichao",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest_wac_2008/2021.naacl-main.178/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.178",
    pages = "2201--2218",
    abstract = "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 understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community`s network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters, and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical leveling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities."
}