Contextual Bearing on Linguistic Variation in Social Media

Microtexts, like SMS messages, Twitter posts, and Facebook status updates, are a popular medium for real-time communication. In this paper, we investigate the writing conventions that different groups of users use to express themselves in microtexts. Our empirical study investigates properties of lexical transforma-tions as observed within Twitter microtexts. The study reveals that different populations of users exhibit different amounts of shortened English terms and different shortening styles. The results reveal valuable insights into how human language technologies can be effec-tively applied to microtexts.