Identifying Linguistically Relevant Communities of Practice on Twitch

Heather Burnett


Abstract
This paper argues that, when it comes to modeling language variation and change on the video game streaming platform Twitch, it is necessary to consider “meso-level” communities of practice, i.e. communities of practice that are smaller than the full video game community, yet larger than the usual level of analysis in recent linguistics studies: communities associated with individual Twitch channels. We present a computational method for identifying these linguistically relevant communities of practice and show how this method can be useful for analyzing quantitative patterns of sociolinguistic variation in a corpus composed of the chat transcripts of 15 streamers of the game Elden Ring: Nightreign.
Anthology ID:
2026.socon-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Context (SoCon) and the 2nd Workshop on Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions (NLPSI) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Marco Antonio Stranisci, Neele Falk, Sofie Labat, Soda Marem Lo, Aswathy Velutharambath, Sabine Weber, Rossana Damiano, Simona Frenda, Veronique Hoste, Bennett Kleinberg, Roman Klinger, Viviana Patti, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Maarten Sap, Seid Muhie Yimam
Venues:
SoCon | NLPSI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
25–33
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-soconnlpsi-03
DOI:
10.63317/4mvivqn6dd8h
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heather Burnett. 2026. Identifying Linguistically Relevant Communities of Practice on Twitch. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Social Context (SoCon) and the 2nd Workshop on Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions (NLPSI) @ LREC 2026, pages 25–33, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Linguistically Relevant Communities of Practice on Twitch (Burnett, SoCon-NLPSI 2026)
Copy Citation: