The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. Our work assesses whether it has also impacted the usage of the Italian language, particularly its lexicon. We create a new corpus of Italian texts taken from Reddit and apply a recent unsupervised usage change detection method on two sub-corpora, one with data from 2019 and one with data from 2020. The focus of our investigation is short-term usage change. The results for the first 10-top candidates and for a selection of candidates among the top-100 are analyzed, to show that usage change has indeed happened.
Word Usage Change and the Pandemic: A Computational Analysis of Short-Term Usage Change in the Italian Reddit Community
Jezek
Writing – Original Draft Preparation
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2022-01-01
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. Our work assesses whether it has also impacted the usage of the Italian language, particularly its lexicon. We create a new corpus of Italian texts taken from Reddit and apply a recent unsupervised usage change detection method on two sub-corpora, one with data from 2019 and one with data from 2020. The focus of our investigation is short-term usage change. The results for the first 10-top candidates and for a selection of candidates among the top-100 are analyzed, to show that usage change has indeed happened.File in questo prodotto:
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