Co-Evolution of Social Networks and

Language Use
Speaker: W. Quin Yow
Writer: Sreetej Lakkam
The advent of language has been base for rapid development in human
interactions since the age of early man. The importance of language is essential
to every aspect of our daily lives. Communication among different entities of
the society drives us ahead and helps in personality development.
Professor Yows group focuses on understanding the role of language usage in
student social networks using advanced data acquisition tools. They intend to
understand the effect of linguistics in a multilingual environment, especially in
formation of social networks among students from different cultural
background.
The research outlines the effect of homophily on social networks and how local
language facilitates initial interactions among college students. Further the
impact of assimilation in group formation is explained. The homophilic effects
due to factors like language proficiency, nationality and code switching
capabilities on friendship networks is analysed in great detail. Reported and
inferred social networks of freshmen and sophomores student groups are
considered and compared on lines of language usage, co-location and call
patterns.
The usage of stochastic actor based model aided in an accurate representation of
the influence of variety of factors like demographics, linguistic skills, and
common interests on the dynamics of friendship networks. Further assuming
friendship network evolution is based on student interactions and usage of
students as nodes, provided an effective platform to study the effect bilingual
and multi-lingual backgrounds on social networking.
On comparing the homophilic effects on different groups it has been inferred
that, freshmen students tend to form friendship with individuals of same cohort
and similar code switching behaviours. On the contrast sophomores tended to
bond with individuals with same language balance but different code-switching
behaviours.

Co-Evolution of Social Networks and

Language Use
The method of using nodal network approach for analysing the changes in
student interaction can be utilised in other networking areas like swarm
dynamics. The clustering coefficient of nodal networks can be used as an
indicator of effectiveness of the network. It can provide data to analyse
The time taken for information exchange within the network.
The effect of node displacement on the whole network.
In social networks among friends the call patterns and co-location data helps in
better understanding interaction between individual students.
The dynamic analysis of mobile positioning and calling patterns to predict
friendship and social interaction rate among culturally varied individuals is
interesting. The research groups usage of social statistics app for data
acquisition in periodic intervals and creation of binary matrices for various
factors is a novel approach. This analysis data of interaction patterns of an
individual, over a span of couple of years can be used to predict emergent social
behavioural patterns in future.
Research orientation in studying social network evolution by using mobile
phone data provides a distinctive advantage in this digital age. Several factors
like continuous access to mobile networks and mobile usage patterns among
young adults of this decade provide abundant opportunities for researchers. This
approach can lead to development of better prediction algorithms useful in other
domains of research. Further the analysis of social network dynamics may
motivate research teams to build tools for improving human interactions.