Language exists in a constant flux: existing in the duality of social structure and the actions of the agents with the system. As a result, new words come and go from people's vocabularies - e.g. the recent introduction of `e-cig' and `vape'. Traditionally this work required to identify these ‘innovations’ is both time consuming and subjective. The talk therefore explores identifying variation in language, in particular language innovations that occur in and across multiple online social networks (innovations could be a change of spelling to the introduction of new words), and how such investigations can be performed at scale.

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