What is it about?
Do definitions in Urban dictionary precede discussions on the same topics on Twitter or is it the other way around? In this paper, we study these patterns and analyze the types of terms that have a stronger connection to discussions on Twitter. We find that Urban Dictionary activity is well aligned with discussions on Twitter when it is centered around terms related to memes, popular public figures, and offline events. We also find that new definitions are more likely to be added to Urban Dictionary for terms that are currently trending on Twitter.
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Why is it important?
As an online, crowd-sourced, open English-language slang dictionary, the Urban Dictionary platform contains a wealth of opinions, jokes, and definitions of terms, phrases, acronyms, and more. However, it is unclear exactly how activity on this platform relates to larger conversations happening elsewhere on the web, such as discussions on larger, more popular social media platforms. In this paper we show a quantitative analysis which helps us better understand the flow of information and discussion between Urban Dictionary and Twitter.
Perspectives
Dictionaries have always fascinated me. I have been working on dictionaries for several years, first for Oxford dictionaries then I collaborated with colleagues at Macmillan dictionary. Working on this paper was an opportunity to look at the interaction between a popular dictionary (Urban Dictionary) and a popular social network (Twitter). It was a great collaboration with natural language processing researchers and computational social scientists.
Dr Barbara B McGillivray
The Alan Turing Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Analyzing Temporal Relationships between Trending Terms on Twitter and Urban Dictionary Activity, July 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3394231.3397905.
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