Twitter vs. printed English: An information-theoretic comparison

Emma Glennon; Lalitha Sankar; H. Vincent Poor

doi:10.1109/ICASSP.2012.6288563

Twitter vs. printed English: An information-theoretic comparison

Emma Glennon, Lalitha Sankar, H. Vincent Poor

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

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.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012 - Proceedings
Pages	3069-3072
Number of pages	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2012.6288563
State	Published - Oct 23 2012
Event	2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012 - Kyoto, Japan Duration: Mar 25 2012 → Mar 30 2012

Other

Other	2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012
Country	Japan
City	Kyoto
Period	3/25/12 → 3/30/12

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Software
Signal Processing
Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Access to Document

10.1109/ICASSP.2012.6288563

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Cite this

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title = "Twitter vs. printed English: An information-theoretic comparison",

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.",

author = "Emma Glennon and Lalitha Sankar and Poor, {H. Vincent}",

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Glennon, E, Sankar, L & Poor, HV 2012, Twitter vs. printed English: An information-theoretic comparison. in 2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012 - Proceedings., 6288563, pp. 3069-3072, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012, Kyoto, Japan, 3/25/12. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2012.6288563

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