Facebook and the Real World: Correlations between Online and Offline Conversations

Are there correlations between language usage in conversations on Facebook and face to face meetings? To answer this question, we collected transcriptions from face to face multi-party conversations between 11 participants, and retrieved their Facebook threads. We automatically annotated the psycholinguistic dimensions in the two domains by means of the LIWC dictionary, and we performed correlation analysis. Results show that some Facebook dimensions, such as “likes” and shares, have a counterpart in face to face communication, in particular the number of questions and the length of statements. The corpus we collected has been anonymized and is available for research purposes.