Computational Sociolinguistics: An Emerging Area for Language Technologies

Abstract

Language is inherently social and it constantly changes and evolves through interaction between individuals, within groups, and between communities. Researchers have become increasingly interested in studying the social aspects of language use with computational methods. We propose an interdisciplinary review on the emerging area of "Computational Sociolinguistics", linking research published in the sociolinguistics community with research published in the computational linguistics community. Our intended readers are computational linguists who are interested in sociolinguistics. We will organize our review of "Computational Sociolinguistics" into three themes: "Language Use and Social Identity Construction", "Language Use within Pairs and Small Groups", and "Dynamics of Language Use in Communities".