Abstract
Educational attainment is a major indicator of a nation’s development stage. Yet, often we have to rely on census information that is done at insufficient periodicity not capturing well the dynamics of certain regions. In this context, social media can act as a sensor of populations with up-to-date information. In this paper, we focus on revealing the relationship between social media vocabulary and educational attainment. This work was performed at the county level for 5 different geographical areas in the United States by comparing the education attainment according to the American community survey to the level of vocabulary used in social media in the same region for the same period of the census (2010–2015). Our results show that social media vocabulary level can reveal the educational attainment of a population for specific areas with a few exceptions concentrated in counties that have a high population density. As a secondary contribution, the sampling method to calculate the vocabulary level in social media may also help using large twitter datasets in the context of social sensing.
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People aged 25 to 34 form the largest fraction of twitter users, with the second largest being between 35 and 44 years old.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Bruno Gonçalves for providing the Twitter dataset from his work [19]. The data was invaluable to us.
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Hamoodat, H., Ribeiro, E., Menezes, R. (2019). Social Media Vocabulary Reveals Education Attainment of Populations. In: Cornelius, S., Granell Martorell, C., Gómez-Gardeñes, J., Gonçalves, B. (eds) Complex Networks X. CompleNet 2019. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14459-3_13
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