Only 50% Of Twitter Messages Are In English

Re:Only 50% Of Twitter Messages Are In English by tibbon on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @08:28AM (#1147922)

As one of the lead researchers at the Web Ecology Project- I can confirm that this was also true in 2009 (our finding of a small sample of 1M tweets found it was ~61% at the time). It doesn't shock me at all that it could be down to as low as 50% at this point.

Jon Beilin of our group wrote and open sourced (MIT/X11-license) a Python language detection module that we used on our Twitter database. http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/code-release-google...

We did not find Japanese to be as high up there as this group did. I can't remember, but I think when we ran ours the Twitter.jp was still running as a separate domain perhaps?

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Re:Only 50% Of Twitter Messages Are In English by patio11 on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @08:41AM (#1147948)

I'm not the most plugged in person to the Japanese Internet, but over the last 6 months or so I've started to see Twitter rise pretty fast here. First it was on the sidebars of the portals, then the Japanese word for "tweet" started to show up in the headlines for the scandal rags that I scan on the train ride to the office, then folks at my office started asking me whether I had a Twitter account yet. So you might be seeing some growth in addition to possible sampling issues.

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