Detection of emerging words in Portuguese tweets

Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of detecting emerging words on a language, based on social networks content. It proposes an approach for detecting new words on Twitter, and reports the achieved results for a collection of 8 million Portuguese tweets. This study uses geolocated tweets, collected between January 2018 and June 2019, and written in the Portuguese territory. The first six months of the data were used to define an initial vocabulary on known words, and the following 12 months were used for identifying new words, thus testing our approach. The set of resulting words were manually analyzed, revealing a number of distinct events, and suggesting that Twitter may be a valuable resource for researching neology, and the dynamics of a language.