Emo, Love, and God: Making Sense of Urban Dictionary, a Crowd-Sourced Online Dictionary

TL;DR

Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary, exhibits rapid growth, diverse content including opinions and informal words, but also contains offensive material, highlighting both its utility and challenges as a language resource.

Contribution

This study combines computational analysis with qualitative annotation to characterize Urban Dictionary's growth, content types, and quality issues, providing insights into crowd-sourced language documentation.

Findings

High presence of opinion-based entries

Coverage of informal and proper nouns

Offensive content exists but is rated lower

Abstract

The Internet facilitates large-scale collaborative projects and the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, where producers and consumers of content unify, has drastically changed the information market. On the one hand, the promise of the "wisdom of the crowd" has inspired successful projects such as Wikipedia, which has become the primary source of crowd-based information in many languages. On the other hand, the decentralized and often un-monitored environment of such projects may make them susceptible to low quality content. In this work, we focus on Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary. We combine computational methods with qualitative annotation and shed light on the overall features of Urban Dictionary in terms of growth, coverage and types of content. We measure a high presence of opinion-focused entries, as opposed to the meaning-focused entries that we expect from traditional dictionaries. Furthermore, Urban Dictionary covers many informal, unfamiliar words as well as proper nouns. Urban Dictionary also contains offensive content, but highly offensive content tends to receive lower scores through the dictionary's voting system. The low threshold to include new material in Urban Dictionary enables quick recording of new words and new meanings, but the resulting heterogeneous content can pose challenges in using Urban Dictionary as a source to study language innovation.