Sociolect-based community detection

“Sociolects” are specialized vocabularies used by social subgroups defined by common interests or origins. We applied methods to retrieve large quantities of Twitter data based on expert-identified sociolects and then applied and developed network-analysis methods to relate sociolect use to network (sub-) structure. We show that novel methods including consideration of node populations, as well as edge counts, provide substantially enhanced performance compared to standard assortativity. We explain these methods, show their utility in analyzing large corpora of social media data, and d iscuss their further extensions and potential applications.