Uncovering the spread of lexical innovation in Italian tweets

This paper outlines ongoing research into lexical innovation in contemporary Italian in the context of social media. To date, the study has used a dataset of 5.32M timestamped and geotagged tweets extracted from the 2022 Italian timeline, yielding 720 emerging word forms. Here, we describe the reproducible pipeline developed to extract candidate neologisms from our dataset and introduce a custom tool to visualise the emergence and spread of candidate neologisms in the time-period under investigation