@InProceedings{shoemark-kirby-goldwater:2017:StyVa,
  author    = {Shoemark, Philippa  and  Kirby, James  and  Goldwater, Sharon},
  title     = {Topic and audience effects on distinctively Scottish vocabulary usage in Twitter data},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation},
  month     = {September},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {59--68},
  abstract  = {Sociolinguistic research suggests that speakers modulate their language style
	in response to their audience. Similar effects have recently been claimed to
	occur in the informal written context of Twitter, with users choosing less
	region-specific and non-standard vocabulary when addressing larger audiences.
	However, these studies have not carefully controlled for the possible confound
	of topic: that is, tweets addressed to a broad audience might also tend towards
	topics that engender a more formal style. In addition, it is not clear to what
	extent previous results generalize to different samples of users. Using
	mixed-effects models, we show that audience and topic have independent effects
	on the rate of distinctively Scottish usage in two demographically distinct
	Twitter user samples. However, not all effects are consistent between the two
	groups, underscoring the importance of replicating studies on distinct user
	samples before drawing strong conclusions from social media data.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-4908}
}