SOLO: A Corpus of Tweets for Examining the State of Being Alone
Table 10: Percentage of words associated with different age groups. Within each age group (column), all the differences are statistically significant (Chi-squared test, p<0.0001).
['[BOLD] Corpus', 'Percentage of words associated with an age group:', 'Percentage of words associated with an age group:', 'Percentage of words associated with an age group:', 'Percentage of words associated with an age group:']
Using the Word–Age Association Lexicon, we calculate the percentage of words associated with each age group in each sub-corpus (loneliness, lonely, solitude, and general tweets). For this, we divide the number of occurrences of words associated with a particular age group by the total number of occurrences of all the words in the lexicon. Within each age group, all the differences between the numbers for each sub-corpus (loneliness, lonely, and solitude) and the general tweets are statistically significant (Chi-squared test, p<0.0001). Observe that the lonely sub-corpus has higher percentages of words associated with the two younger groups (as compared with the general tweets) and lower percentage of words associated with the two older groups. The differences for the teenage group and the older adults (30+ years old) are particularly large (21% increase for the teenage group, 13% decrease for the 30 and over group). The solitude sub-corpus shows the opposite pattern with lower percentage of words associated with the two younger groups and higher percentage of words associated with the two older groups. The differences between the numbers for the loneliness corpus and the general tweets are relatively small for all four age groups. These results suggest that there are more younger people (especially teenagers) among the tweeters that use the word lonely when talking about being alone and, therefore, have more negative experiences when alone, than among the tweeters that use the word solitude and have more positive attitudes to the state of being alone. This finding does not support the psychology literature that proposes that adolescence may be a time when being alone is adaptive and enjoyable It is possible, however, that adolescents may use Twitter to vent or share feelings about loneliness more often than other age groups.