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The study of Online Social Networks offers growing opportunities to examine a number of aspects of the real world and to better understand how human society works at scale. One crucial research direction, constantly evolving over time, concerns the language adopted by users and its impact on online communities. To provide a contribution in this setting, in this paper, we adopt a multi-relational model for social network and identify a new typology of relation, namely co-interest, as an explicit common declaration of engagement towards a given topic among pair of users. Thematic communities can be, hence, derived leveraging such relations. After that, exploiting Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques, we identify and define suitable analysis metrics focusing on the characteristics of the language adopted in such communities. With the objective of analyzing how the adoption of different language may impact the formation of cohesive and strong communities, to make our study general, we consider two very popular and intrinsically different social platforms, namely Twitter and Reddit. The analysis carried out in this paper aims at comparing the two social media to find interesting and novel results about how their users compose textual comments and the corresponding impact on users' interaction. Interestingly, the obtained results show that, although the main factor is related to the popularity of the user generating the content, the characteristics of the adopted language play a non negligible role in the formation of strong communities in social systems. • Investigation about language characteristics of Online Social Networks posts (OSN). • Language analysis to identify the evolution dynamics of online communities. • Correlation between potential post engagement and user adopted language style. • Relationship between the content produced in OSNs and the formation of communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic accident detection is an important strategy governments can use to implement policies intended to reduce accidents. They usually use techniques such as image processing, RFID devices, among others. Social network mining has emerged as a low-cost alternative. However, social networks come with several challenges such as informal language and misspellings. This paper proposes a method to extract traffic accident data from Twitter in Spanish. The method consists of four phases. The first phase establishes the data collection mechanisms. The second consists of vectorially representing the messages and classifying them as accidents or non-accidents. The third phase uses named entity recognition techniques to detect the location. In the fourth phase, locations pass through a geocoder that returns their geographic coordinates. This method was applied to Bogota city and the data on Twitter were compared with the official traffic information source; comparisons showed some influence of Twitter on the commercial and industrial area of the city. The results reveal how effective the information on accidents reported on Twitter can be. It should therefore be considered as a source of information that may complement existing detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]