Blog: CMU Research Finds Regional Dialects Are Alive and Well on Twitter

CMU Research Finds Regional Dialects Are Alive and Well on Twitter
Carnegie Mellon News (PA) (01/06/11) Byron Spice

Regional slang is evident in Twitter postings, but such dialects appear to be evolving in social media, as determined by a Twitter word usage analysis method developed by Jacob Eisenstein and colleagues in Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU's) Machine Learning Department. Eisenstein says Twitter offers a new means of examining regional lexicon, since tweets are informal and conversational, while tweeters using cell phones can opt to tag their messages with global positioning system coordinates. The CMU researchers collected seven days' worth of Twitter messages in March 2010, and chose geotagged messages from Twitter users who wrote at least 20 messages. From this they generated a database of 9,500 users and 380,000 messages. The team used a statistical model to identify regional variation in word use and topics that could predict the geographical whereabouts of a microblogger in the continental United States with a median error of approximately 300 miles. The researchers can only speculate on the profiles of the microbloggers, and Eisenstein says it is reasonable to assume that users who send many tweets via cell phone are younger than average Twitter users--and this appears to be mirrored by the subjects these users tend to discuss. Through automated analysis of Twitter message streams, linguists can observe the real-time evolution of regional dialects.

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