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A Language-Centric Study of Twitter Connectivity

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10047))

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Abstract

One factor influencing human online connectivity, which only recently has been receiving attention, is the language used by the user in his activities. This paper uses Twitter (a popular online social network) to shed light on the effect of language to the online connectivity of people. Using techniques from Network Science, our work shows that Twitter users have a stronger preference to connect to people who use a common language, but more importantly, that this preference is stronger than the trend of connecting to people with similar popularity. Furthermore, we also show that the connecting patterns between users of different languages vary considerably; we use the concept of entropy to measure the degree of variation in the connecting patterns for each language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://about.twitter.com/company.

  2. 2.

    http://aboutworldlanguages.com/indo-european-language-family.

  3. 3.

    https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2299454/4-google-carousel-optimization-tips.

  4. 4.

    https://sysomos.com/inside-twitter.

  5. 5.

    http://g20.org.

  6. 6.

    http://www.statista.com/statistics/267129/most-used-languages-on-twitter/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida, USA

    Priya Saha & Ronaldo Menezes

Authors
  1. Priya Saha
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  2. Ronaldo Menezes
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Correspondence to Priya Saha .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Emma Spiro

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Yong-Yeol Ahn

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Saha, P., Menezes, R. (2016). A Language-Centric Study of Twitter Connectivity. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10047. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_33

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47873-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47874-6

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