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Cursing in English on twitter

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Cursing is not uncommon during conversations in the physical world: 0.5% to 0.7% of all the words we speak are curse words, given that 1% of all the words are first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us, our). On social media, people can instantly chat with friends without face-to-face interaction, usually in a more public fashion and broadly disseminated through highly connected social network. Will these distinctive features of social media lead to a change in people's cursing behavior? In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity on a popular social media platform - Twitter, involving the analysis of about 51 million tweets and about 14 million users. In particular, we explore a set of questions that have been recognized as crucial for understanding cursing in offline communications by prior studies, including the ubiquity, utility, and contextual dependencies of cursing.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 15 February 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. cursing.
    2. emotion
    3. gender difference
    4. profanity
    5. social media
    6. twitter

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    February 15 - 19, 2014
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    CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab studyBehavior Research Methods10.3758/s13428-024-02376-656:4(3794-3813)Online publication date: 9-May-2024
    • (2024)Networks of Negativity: Gaining Attention Through CyberbullyingInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph2112169921:12(1699)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2024
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