Frozen Binomials on the Web: Word Ordering and Language Conventions in Online Text
Table 2. Covariance table for movement in r/nba, r/nfl and r/politics.
['[EMPTY]', 'r/nba', 'r/nfl', 'r/politics']
Movement. The vast majority of binomials have low movement. However, the exceptions to this can be very informative. Within r/nba a few of these pairs show clear change in linguistics and/or culture. The binomial [‘rpm’, ‘vorp’] (a pair of basketball statistics) started at 0.74 ordinality and within three years dropped to 0.32 ordinality, showing a potential change in users’ representation of how these statistics relate to each other. In r/politics, [‘daughter’, ‘son’] moved from 0.07 ordinality to 0.36 ordinality over ten years. This may represent a cultural shift in how users refer to children, or a shift in topics discussed relating to children. And in r/politics, [’dems’, ’obama’] went from 0.75 ordinality to 0.43 ordinality from 2009–2018, potentially reflecting changes in Obama’s role as a defining feature of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile the ratio of unigram frequency of ‘dems’ to ‘obama’ actually increased from 10% to 20% from 2010 to 2017. Similarly, [‘fdr’, ‘lincoln’] moved from 0.49 ordinality to 0.17 ordinality from 2015–2018. This is particularly interesting, since in 2016 ‘fdr’ had a unigram frequency 20% higher than ‘lincoln’, but in 2017 they are almost the same. This suggests that movement could be unrelated to unigram frequency changes. Note also that the covariance for movement across subreddits is