Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 10: Opinion Formation I

SOE 10.1: Talk

Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 10:15–10:30, H37

Dynamics of competing words — •Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Martin Gerlach, Jose M. Miotto, and Eduardo G. Altmann — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

How does a community choose between different terms with similar meanings? How is consensus achieved? How is the evolution of the frequency of words borrowed from different languages when compared to their translated counterparts? Answering these questions would not only help us to improve our understanding of language change but would also bring insights on the dynamics of social interactions. Borrowing and social interactions are two key elements shaping language change and have accelerated during recent decades due to globalization. In this work, we apply data mining techniques to statistically analyze empirical data in different communities. We try to detect the general trends of emerging and competing words. We focus on scientific and technical terms for which consensus is usually stimulated, and we try to estimate the impact and significance of these regulatory efforts. We then compare different simple models and compare their predictions to the empirical data and we discuss if social network structure could play role on the dynamics of words spreading.