Studying Multicultural Diversity of Cities and Neighborhoods through Social Media Language Detection

Abstract

Cities are growing as melting pots of people with different culture, religion, and language. In this paper, through multilingual analysis of Twitter contents shared within a city, we analyze the prevalent language in the different neighborhoods of the city and we compare the results with census data, in order to highlight any parallelisms or discrepancies between the two data sources. We show that the officially identified neighborhoods are actually representing significantly different communities and that the use of the social media as a data source helps to detect those weak signals that are not captured from traditional data.