Cursing in English on twitter

Abstract

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.

Features for Ranking Tweets Based on Credibility and Newsworthiness

“…Our curse word lexicon is the top ten most frequently used curse words as determined by Wang et al [48].…”

FLOSS as a Source for Profanity and Insults: Collecting the Data

“…Existing NLP and ML approaches to profanity detection in online communities include [13][14] [15]. Some of these (e.g.…”

“…Some of these (e.g. [13][14]) rely on word lists, either created by the researchers themselves, or using a combination of downloadable lists. Others (e.g.…”

“…On Internet chatrooms, research shows about 3% of the chat entries contain profanity [30], or about 40 per hour (recall that television rates were about 12.5 per hour). The researchers in [13] found that around 7% of all tweets on Twitter contain at least one profanity. Since email messages are substantially longer than tweets, and since our counts are on a per-message basis, not a per-word or even per-sentence basis, we can not claim that the rates of profanity on FLOSS email mailing lists are anywhere close to prime-time television, Twitter, teen chat rooms, or daily American life.…”

When Code Governs Community

“…The prevalent toxicity across video games and online communities has posed both theoretical and practical challenges to governance [1,12,21,38]. What constitutes the optimal mode of governance, as well as under what criteria [7,9,13,22] has always been a contested topic, with no definite answer.…”