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Analyzing Temporal Relationships between Trending Terms on Twitter and Urban Dictionary Activity

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Wilson, SR 
Magdy, W 
McGillivray, Barbara  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3426-8200
Tyson, G 

Abstract

© 2020 ACM. As an online, crowd-sourced, open English-language slang dictionary, the Urban Dictionary platform contains a wealth of opinions, jokes, and definitions of terms, phrases, acronyms, and more. However, it is unclear exactly how activity on this platform relates to larger conversations happening elsewhere on the web, such as discussions on larger, more popular social media platforms. In this research, we study the temporal activity trends on Urban Dictionary and provide the first analysis of how this activity relates to content being discussed on a major social network: Twitter. By collecting the whole of Urban Dictionary, as well as a large sample of tweets over seven years, we explore the connections between the words and phrases that are defined and searched for on Urban Dictionary and the content that is talked about on Twitter. Through a series of cross-correlation calculations, we identify cases in which Urban Dictionary activity closely reflects the larger conversation happening on Twitter. Then, we analyze the types of terms that have a stronger connection to discussions on Twitter, finding that Urban Dictionary activity that is positively correlated with Twitter is centered around terms related to memes, popular public figures, and offline events. Finally, We explore the relationship between periods of time when terms are trending on Twitter and the corresponding activity on Urban Dictionary, revealing that new definitions are more likely to be added to Urban Dictionary for terms that are currently trending on Twitter.

Description

Keywords

46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4701 Communication and Media Studies, 47 Language, Communication and Culture

Journal Title

WebSci 2020 - Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science

Conference Name

WebSci '20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

ACM

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Alan Turing Institute (EP/N510129/1)