Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics I

SOE 7.3: Talk

Monday, March 14, 2011, 16:30–16:45, GÖR 226

Dissemination of words in online discussion groups — •Eduardo G. Altmann — Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden

Statistics of word usage provide quantifiable measures that can lead to a deeper understanding of different social systems. For instance, when analyzing large-scale databases of human interactions (mobile phone calls, e-mails, etc.) the content of the messages is a key element (often neglected) to understand the underlying social network. Furthermore, vocabulary change is itself a fascinating complex system that can nowadays be analyzed with an unprecedent precision. Here I will report on our investigation of word usage in Usenet groups, a database spanning decades that has detailed user information and interesting historical data (e.g., of the exogenously-driven rise of products and of the endogenously-driven rise of Internet slangs). To deal with the strong fluctuations in word frequency, we introduce a measure of word dissemination in respect to users and topics. We observe that most words are less disseminated than a random marker with same frequency and that dissemination is positively correlated with frequency change, meaning that words concentrated in a small ``niche'' are more probable to decay in frequency or get ``extinct''. Finally, we show that users are more important than topics in determining the usage of words, suggesting that the heterogeneity of people is the single strongest factor in lexical diversity.

[1] E. G. Altmann, J. B. Pierrehumbert, and A. E. Motter, "Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups", arXiv:1009.3321 (2010).