Twitter vs. printed English: An information-theoretic comparison

Author

Glennon, Emma ; Sankar, Lalitha ; Poor, H. Vincent

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

25-30 March 2012

Firstpage

3069

Lastpage

3072

Abstract

The popular social networking and microblogging service Twitter contains language that is very different from what is considered proper. This paper quantifies those linguistic differences between printed English and Tweetspeak using information-theoretic concepts. Letter-based n-gram entropies are calculated and compared to analagous data from two corpora of printed English to demonstrate that 1) Twitter´s entropy is overall higher than that of printed English, and 2) individual users´ entropies are on average higher the less conventional their language use is. The implications for digitally-mediated communication in general are also discussed.

Keywords

computer mediated communication; entropy; linguistics; social networking (online); Tweetspeak; Twitter; digitally-mediated communication; information-theoretic comparison; letter-based n-gram entropies; linguistic differences; microblogging service; printed English; social networking service; Educational institutions; Entropy; Handicapped aids; Radio access networks; Redundancy; Standards; Twitter; Twitter; computer mediated communication; information entropy; information theory; redundancy;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2012 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Kyoto

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0045-2

Electronic_ISBN

1520-6149

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2012.6288563

Filename

6288563