---
title: "Now We Stronger than Ever — Stewart 2014"
description: "This student workshop paper outlines a senior thesis that examines how African-American English (AAE) syntax is distributed geographically and…"
authors: ["Ian Stewart"]
year: 2014
venue: "Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/E14-3004/"
doi: "10.3115/v1/e14-3004"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/stewart-2014-now-we-stronger-than-ever/"
---
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# Now We Stronger than Ever: African-American English Syntax in Twitter

**Authors:** Ian Stewart · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/E14-3004/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/E14-3004.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/v1/e14-3004](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/e14-3004) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250834934)

**Citations:** 11 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [14](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
This student workshop paper outlines a senior thesis that examines how African-American English (AAE) syntax is distributed geographically and demographically on Twitter. Most AAE research relies on interviews, letters, or child-acquisition studies, which tend to be tied to particular places and can lag behind current youth usage. The author collected US geotagged tweets from July to December 2013 and removed spam and unmarked retweets. The tweets were then annotated with two part-of-speech taggers. Regular-expression patterns over word and tag sequences located constructions such as copula deletion, habitual be, and negative concord. Each matching tweet was linked to Census demographics for its ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA), and each user's gender was estimated from their first name. Comparisons of mean demographics and logistic regressions against Standard American English (SAE) equivalents showed no clear link between local ethnic makeup and AAE syntax, which points to wide diffusion of the dialect. Women, however, appeared to use these constructions more than men. The work shows that POS-tagged social media corpora can support large-scale research on syntactic variation, an area that receives far less attention than phonetic or lexical variation.

## Key points
- **Corpus construction:**
  - Tweets came from the public streaming API (about 5% of all traffic), restricted to geotagged posts from the US.
  - Tweets with URLs and users with fewer than 20 messages were dropped, leaving roughly 200 million tweets.
  - Unmarked retweets were filtered by removing any tweet containing a 6-gram that appeared more than 10 times within a single day. This step shrank the data by about 26%.
- **Tagging:** Two taggers were used.
  - The Gimpel et al. (2011) Twitter tagger has 25 tags and over 90% accuracy.
  - A Penn Treebank-style model from Derczynski et al. (2013) was needed for morphology-dependent features such as 3rd-person singular -s drop.
- **Constructions queried:** dropping of the copula, habitual be, steady as a continuative marker, done marking completion, finna for the future, been for the remote past, negative concord, negative inversion, the null genitive, and the ass camouflage construction.
- **Demographic linking:**
  - Ethnicity, population size, median age, and rental share came from the ZCTA of each tweet.
  - Gender was assigned using the 1995 Social Security Administration baby-name list.
  - The dataset covered 1,135,019 users, and 45.62% of them used copula deletion.
- **Results:**
  - The mean African-American share in the ZCTAs of AAE users (about 14–15%) was barely above the overall average of 13.67%.
  - In the regressions, the female coefficients were positive (roughly 0.03–0.07) for most AAE/SAE pairs.
  - The author's proposed next steps are diachronic analysis and semi-supervised detection of constructions.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/)

## Cited by

Cited by

14 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 10 not yet.

- [Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/cao-2020-gender-inclusive-coreference-resolution/)
- [Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle*](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/cao-2021-gender-inclusive-coreference-resolution-analysis/)
- [Twitter Universal Dependency Parsing for African-American and Mainstream American English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ud-2018-blodgett-twitter-universal-dependency-parsing-african/)
- [VALUE: Understanding Dialect Disparity in NLU](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ziems-2022-value-understanding-dialect-disparity-nlu/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{stewart2014now,
  title = {{Now We Stronger than Ever: African-American English Syntax in Twitter}},
  author = {Stewart, Ian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/e14-3004},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/e14-3004}
}
```

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## References

18 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Shane Bergsma, Mark Dredze, Benjamin van Durme, Theresa Wilson, and David Yarowsky. 2013. Broadly Improving User Classification via Communication-Based Name and Location Clustering on Twitter. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2013, pages 1010–1019. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Shane+Bergsma%2C+Mark+Dredze%2C+Benjamin+van+Durme%2C+Theresa+Wilson%2C+and+David+Yarowsky%2E+2013%2E+Broadly+Improving+User+Classification+via+Communication%2DBased+Name+and+Location+Clustering+on+Twitter%2E+Proceed)
2. Leon Derczynski, Alan Ritter, Sam Clark, and Kalina Bontcheva. 2013. Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagging for All: Overcoming Sparse and Noisy Data. Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 198–206. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Leon+Derczynski%2C+Alan+Ritter%2C+Sam+Clark%2C+and+Kalina+Bontcheva%2E+2013%2E+Twitter+Part%2Dof%2DSpeech+Tagging+for+All%3A+Overcoming+Sparse+and+Noisy+Data%2E+Proceedings+of+Recent+Advances+in+Natural+Language+Proces)
3. Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner. 2013. The Demographics of Social Media Users - 2012. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, pages 1–14. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Maeve+Duggan+and+Joanna+Brenner%2E+2013%2E+The+Demographics+of+Social+Media+Users+%2D+2012%2E+Pew+Research+Center%E2%80%99s+Internet+%26+American+Life+Project%2C+pages+1%E2%80%9314%2E)
4. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2013. Language and Gender. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2 edition. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139245883)
5. Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah Smith, and Eric Xing. 2010. A latent variable model for geographic lexical variation. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jacob+Eisenstein%2C+Brendan+O%E2%80%99Connor%2C+Noah+Smith%2C+and+Eric+Xing%2E+2010%2E+A+latent+variable+model+for+geographic+lexical+variation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Conference+on+Empirical+Methods+in+Natural+Language)
6. Jacob Eisenstein, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2011. Discovering Sociolinguistic Associations with Structured Sparsity. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1(49):1365–1374. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jacob+Eisenstein%2C+Noah+A%2E+Smith%2C+and+Eric+P%2E+Xing%2E+2011%2E+Discovering+Sociolinguistic+Associations+with+Structured+Sparsity%2E+Proceedings+of+the+49th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+for+Computational+)
7. Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider, Brendan O’Connor, Dipanjan Das, Daniel Mills, Jacob Eisenstein, Michael Heilman, Dani Yogatama, Jeffrey Flanigan, and Noah A. Smith. 2011. Part-of-Speech Tagging for Twitter: Annotation, Features, and Experiments. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, pages 380–390. [↗](https://doi.org/10.21236/ada547371)
8. Lisa Green and Thomas Roeper. 2007. The Acquisition Path for Tense-Aspect: Remote Past and Habitual in Child African American English. Language Acquisition, 14(3):269–313. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/10489220701471024)
9. Lisa Green. 2002. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Lisa+Green%2E+2002%2E+African+American+English%3A+A+Linguistic+Introduction%2E+Cambridge+University+Press%2C+Cambridge%2E)
10. Tyler Kendall, Joan Bresnan, and Gerard van Herk. 2011. The dative alternation in African American English: Researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistics Theory, 7(2):229–244. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2011.011)
11. William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2005. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Walter de Gruyer, Berlin. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=William+Labov%2C+Sharon+Ash%2C+and+Charles+Boberg%2E+2005%2E+The+Atlas+of+North+American+English%3A+Phonetics%2C+Phonology%2C+and+Sound+Change%2E+Walter+de+Gruyer%2C+Berlin%2E)
12. Wiliam Labov. 2012. Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular. University of Philadelphia Press, Philadelphia, PA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Wiliam+Labov%2E+2012%2E+Language+in+the+inner+city%3A+Studies+in+the+black+English+vernacular%2E+University+of+Philadelphia+Press%2C+Philadelphia%2C+PA%2E)
13. Olutobi Owoputi, Brendan O’Connor, Chris Dyer, Kevin Gimpel, Nathan Schneider, and Noah A. Smith. 2013. Improved Part-of-Speech Tagging for Online Conversational Text with Word Clusters. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2013, pages 380–390. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Olutobi+Owoputi%2C+Brendan+O%E2%80%99Connor%2C+Chris+Dyer%2C+Kevin+Gimpel%2C+Nathan+Schneider%2C+and+Noah+A%2E+Smith%2E+2013%2E+Improved+Part%2Dof%2DSpeech+Tagging+for+Online+Conversational+Text+with+Word+Clusters%2E+Proceedings+o) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/owoputi-2013-improved-part-speech-tagging-online/)
14. Angela Reyes. 2005. Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4):509–532. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Angela+Reyes%2E+2005%2E+Appropriation+of+African+American+slang+by+Asian+American+youth%2E+Journal+of+Sociolinguistics%2C+9%284%29%3A509%E2%80%93532%2E)
15. Sanjay Sharma. 2013. Black Twitter?: Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 78(1):46–64. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sanjay+Sharma%2E+2013%2E+Black+Twitter%3F%3A+Racial+Hashtags%2C+Networks+and+Contagion%2E+new+formations%3A+a+journal+of+culture%2Ftheory%2Fpolitics%2C+78%281%29%3A46%E2%80%9364%2E)
16. Luke Sloan, Jeffrey Morgan, William Housley, Matthew Williams, Adam Edwards, Pete Burnap, and Omer Rana. 2013. Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter. Sociological Research Online, 18(3). [↗](https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3001)
17. Walt Wolfram. 2004. Urban African American Vernacular English: morphology and syntax*. In Bernard Kortmann, editor, A handbook of varieties of English. 1. Phonology, Volume 2, volume 2, pages 319–340. Walter de Gruyer. Jim Wood and Natalie Zanuttini. The Yale Grammatical Diversity [http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/.2014](http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/.2014). Project. [↗](http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/.2014)
18. Malcah Yaeger-Dror and Erik R. Thomas. 2010. African American English Speakers and Their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study. Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, Durham, NC. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Malcah+Yaeger%2DDror+and+Erik+R%2E+Thomas%2E+2010%2E+African+American+English+Speakers+and+Their+Participation+in+Local+Sound+Changes%3A+A+Comparative+Study%2E+Duke+University+Press+for+the+American+Dialect+Socie)