The Mexican Gayze: A Computational Analysis of the Attitudes towards the LGBT+ Population in Mexico on Social Media Across a Decade

Scott Andersen, Segio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba, Juan Vásquez, Gemma Bel-Enguix


Abstract
Thanks to the popularity of social media, data generated by online communities provides an abundant source of diverse language information. This abundance of data allows NLP practitioners and computational linguists to analyze sociolinguistic phenomena occurring in digital communication. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter discourse around the Mexican Spanish-speaking LGBT+ community. For this, we evaluate how the polarity of some nouns related to the LGBT+ community has evolved in conversational settings using a corpus of tweets that cover a time span of ten years. We hypothesize that social media’s fast-moving, turbulent linguistic environment encourages language evolution faster than ever before. Our results indicate that most of the inspected terms have undergone some shift in denotation or connotation. No other generalizations can be observed in the data, given the difficulty that current NLP methods have to account for polysemy, and the wide differences between the various subgroups that make up the LGBT+ community. A fine-grained analysis of a series of LGBT+-related lexical terms is also included in this work.
Anthology ID:
2024.woah-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Yi-Ling Chung, Zeerak Talat, Debora Nozza, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Paul Röttger, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Agostina Calabrese
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
178–200
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.woah-1.14
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.woah-1.14
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Scott Andersen, Segio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba, Juan Vásquez, and Gemma Bel-Enguix. 2024. The Mexican Gayze: A Computational Analysis of the Attitudes towards the LGBT+ Population in Mexico on Social Media Across a Decade. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024), pages 178–200, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Mexican Gayze: A Computational Analysis of the Attitudes towards the LGBT+ Population in Mexico on Social Media Across a Decade (Andersen et al., WOAH-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.woah-1.14.pdf