Cursing in English on twitter

作者：Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit Sheth · 年份：2014 · DOI：10.1145/2531602.2531734 · 被引用次数：171 · 研究领域：Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism、Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection、Digital Communication and Language

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.