Publication details
Word Usage Change and the Pandemic: A Computational Analysis of Short-Term Usage Change in the Italian Reddit Community
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | IJCoL. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.1076 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/ijcol.1076 |
| Keywords | Word Usage Change; Diachronic Linguistics; Web Corpora |
| Attached files | |
| Description | The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. Our work assesses whether it has also impacted the usage of the Italian language, particularly its lexicon. We create a new corpus of Italian texts taken from Reddit and apply a recent unsupervised usage change detection method on two sub-corpora, one with data from 2019 and one with data from 2020. The focus of our investigation is short-term usage change. The results for the first 10-top candidates and for a selection of candidates among the top-100 are analyzed, to show that usage change has indeed happened. |