Abstract
In a chat discourse it is not always clear who is chatting with whom; automatic discourse analysis is especially problematic. It is important to identify the users' nicknames in the written discourse to find out the receivers of the chat messages. But the linguistic possibilities in nickname creation, and also of using them in the discourse, are various. To study how nicknames are created and used in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), logs of 13 channels consisting of 8937 public chat messages and 7936 unique nicknames were analyzed in detail. The paper shows, among other things, the basic structure of IRC nicknames, of which parts-of-speech group nicknames are compounded, and which parts-of-speech of a nickname are omitted within the chat discourse. This knowledge leads to a better prediction as to whether there is a link between a current logged-in user and the examined word in discourse, which can be a shortened or creatively changed form of a nickname.
Highlights
Nicknames have been used since the Middle Ages and today in a computing context the word nickname is omnipresent, especially in computer-mediated communication
The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between Internet Relay Chat (IRC) nicks, which are used by the current logged-in chatters, and the identified shortened or creatively changed forms of nicks from written messages for later automatic discourse analysis
If a user on the auto kick list (AKICK) attempts to join the channel, a channel service bot (ChanServ) will automatically kick and ban the participant from the channel. 4.4 Basic Structure of IRC Nicknames The results of the analysis show that nicknames can be divided into stem-based (99.84%), non stem-based (0.11%), and mixed-based nicks (0.05%)
Summary
Nicknames have been used since the Middle Ages and today in a computing context the word nickname is omnipresent, especially in computer-mediated communication. To prevent misunderstandings regarding the addressing of a message, the nick of the receiver is frequently put in front of the message, followed by a colon and a space This is one of the basic (written and unwritten) rules of online communication; it is called netiquette. The nicks of the speakers are surrounded by angle brackets, followed by a written user message (as they appear on IRC). This extract points out the following problems: First, as mentioned above, direct addressing is not always used or required. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between IRC nicks, which are used by the current logged-in chatters, and the identified shortened or creatively changed forms of nicks from written messages for later automatic discourse analysis.
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