Jack Benny Tropes Return: Tweets Are Making the Oooooold New Again
June 5, 2020
The Jack Benny Radio Show. A character tagged Frank Nelson, who says, “Yeeeeeesssss.” Funny, yep. When? A half century ago. So what?
Even with the breath of emojis, GIFs, videos, and other accoutrement it is hard to express emotional intent through text. Wired investigated the how and why emotions are expressed in the article, “Whoooaaa Duuuuude: Why We Stretch Words In Tweets And Texts.”
The University of Vermont researched Twitter tweets about why elongated words are used so much on the social media platform. They discovered that stretching a word is a linguistic device conveying a varied emotional range from excitement to sarcasm. Exclamation points are the old dead tree way to express anything from excitement to fear, but apparently they are old fashioned and it shows restraint not to use one. People turn to stretched words to add more meaning to their tweets.
The University of Vermont examined 10% of tweets sent between 2008-2016 for elongated words. Their research yielded interesting patterns, but the most obvious is how complex human emotion is for AI:
“Because stretched words can be embedded with so much extra meaning beyond the words themselves, understanding them is critical for artificial intelligences that analyze text, like chatbots. At the moment, a stretched word may be so perplexing for an AI that the program just skips over it entirely. We don’t want to have to bold or italicize words to emphasize them for the chatbot to parse—and even then, such formatting can’t replicate the range of emotions that stretched words convey.”
Studies like this help AI and machine learning understand the subtle nuances involved in human language. It will be decades before machines are entirely capable of understanding human language patterns, but they more data they have the closer they come.
Oh, Rochester, yessssss bossssss.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2020
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