Mapping Languages and Demographics with Georeferenced Corpora

Type of content
Conference Contributions - Published
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Date
2019
Authors
Dunn, Jonathan
Adams, Ben
Abstract

This paper evaluates large georeferenced corpora, taken from both web-crawled and social media sources, against ground-truth population and language-census datasets. The goal is to determine (i) which dataset best represents population demographics; (ii) in what parts of the world the datasets are most representative of actual populations; and (iii) how to weight the datasets to provide more accurate representations of underlying populations. The paper finds that the two datasets represent very different populations and that they correlate with actual populations with values of r = 0.60 (social media) and r = 0.49 (web-crawled). Further, Twitter data makes better predictions about the inventory of languages used in each country.

Description
Citation
Dunn J, Adams B (2019). Mapping Languages and Demographics with Georeferenced Corpora. Proceedings of Geocomputation 2019.
Keywords
user-generated content, crowdsourcing, language, demographics, population
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Fields of Research::47 - Language, communication and culture::4704 - Linguistics::470406 - Historical, comparative and typological linguistics
Field of Research::20 - Language, Communication and Culture::2004 - Linguistics::200402 - Computational Linguistics
Field of Research::16 - Studies in Human Society::1603 - Demography::160399 - Demography not elsewhere classified
Field of Research::16 - Studies in Human Society::1604 - Human Geography::160403 - Social and Cultural Geography
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