arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Digital diglossia: Arabic between X and Facebook

The study examines how Standard Arabic (SA) and Colloquial Arabic (CA) are distributed across X and Facebook by analyzing 10,000 public posts classified into seven discourse categories. Statistical tests reveal significant associations between discourse category and diglossic choice on both platforms, with platform also influencing diglossic choice. Logistic regression shows higher odds of SA use on X in certain domains, indicating that digital platforms reshape but do not erase diglossic boundaries.

By Fahad Al Hussen (King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Mohammed Q. Shormani (Ibb University, Ibb, Yemen)
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC): An Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC) is an open, modular corpus comprising over 527 million English‑language Reddit posts from 2007 to 2023, curated for relevance to six social group distinctions—race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone. A multi‑step, human‑audited filtering pipeline keeps irrelevant content below 10% overall and per group, while each post receives algorithmic annotations of user home region and a suite of validated semantic labels such as moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. ISAAC’s publicly available, reproducible pipeline enables cross‑category comparisons, high‑precision tracking of long‑term temporal shifts, and spatial mapping of public opinion and policy outcomes, and can be extended to new platforms, languages, and social categories via both point‑and‑click and programmatic interfaces.

By Babak Hemmatian, Sarah Hadjarab, Jessica Chen, Benedek Kurdi