Identifying regional dialects in online social media

Electronic social media offers new opportunities for informal communication in written language, while at the same time, providing new datasets that allow researchers to document dialect variation from records of natural communication among millions of individuals. The unprecedented scale of this data enables the application of quantitative methods to automatically discover the lexical variables that distinguish the language of geographical areas such as cities. This can be paired with the segmentation of geographical space into dialect regions, within the context of a single joint statistical model — thus simultaneously identifying coherent dialect regions and the words that distinguish them. Finally, a diachronic analysis reveals rapid changes in the geographical distribution of these lexical features, suggesting that statistical analysis of social media may offer new insights on the diffusion of lexical change.