# Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07544 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07544/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03514/) (2023)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [VALUE: Understanding Dialect Disparity in NLU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03031/) (2022)
- [The Homogenizing Effect of Large Language Models on Human Expression and Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01491/) (2025)
- [Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06820/) (2021)
- [Does It Capture STEL? A Modular, Similarity-based Linguistic Style Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04817/) (2021)
- [Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12578/) (2023)
- [Words as Gatekeepers: Measuring Discipline-specific Terms and Meanings in Scholarly Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09676/) (2022)
- [The Call for Socially Aware Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02411/) (2024)
- [The Sociolinguistic Foundations of Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09241/) (2024)
- [Learning to Parallelize in a Shared-Memory Environment with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12835/) (2022)
- [LMSOC: An Approach for Socially Sensitive Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10319/) (2021)
- [Resources for Turkish Natural Language Processing: A critical survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05042/) (2022)
- [Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07611/) (2022)
- [An Assessment of the Impact of OCR Noise on Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00470/) (2022)
- [Social Analysis of Young Basque Speaking Communities in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03487/) (2021)
- [On the Universality of Deep Contextual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07140/) (2021)
- [Using Sociolinguistic Variables to Reveal Changing Attitudes Towards Sexuality and Gender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11061/) (2021)
- [The Open-domain Paradox for Chatbots: Common Ground as the Basis for Human-like Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11708/) (2023)
- [Capturing the diversity of multilingual societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02570/) (2021)
- [Black or White but never neutral: How readers perceive identity from yellow or skin-toned emoji](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05887/) (2021)
- [American cultural regions mapped through the lexical analysis of social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07649/) (2022)
- [Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08635/) (2022)
- [NTULM: Enriching Social Media Text Representations with Non-Textual Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16586/) (2022)
- [Personality Type Based on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with Text Posting Style by using Traditional and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08717/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Natural Language Generation Advances from the Perspective of Digital Deception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05757/) (2022)
- [Comparing Measures of Linguistic Diversity Across Social Media Language Data and Census Data at Subnational Geographic Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10452/) (2023)
- [Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03874/) (2024)
- [Who is bragging more online? A large scale analysis of bragging in social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16668/) (2024)
- [A Typology of Synthetic Datasets for Dialogue Processing in Clinical Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03025/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.