Social Links from Latent Topics in Microblogs

Language use is overlaid on a network of social connections, which exerts an influence on both the topics of discussion and the ways that these topics can be expressed (Halliday, 1978). In the past, efforts to understand this relationship were stymied by a lack of data, but social media offers exciting new opportunities. By combining large linguistic corpora with explicit representations of social network structures, social media provides a new window into the interaction between language and society. Our long term goal is to develop joint sociolinguistic models that explain the social basis of linguistic variation.