A Study on the Persian Corpus Developed from Cyberspace

Nowadays, the existence of emerging communication tools has made communication between speakers possible through writing. The electronic, global and interactive nature of such emerging technologies has facilitated and increased the speed of communication. The linguistic interaction by using these tools and the relationship between speech and writing have causes a type of writing to be created by the users of a language, a writing type known as “neography”. The main aim of this research is to investigate the properties of neography in Persian and classify them into the categories based on a linguistic corpus developed from the data published in social media. To this end, the corpus is semi-automatically annotated based on the standard writing style, and the linguistic properties at phonetic, morphological and syntax levels. Then, the words whose written forms are different from the standard form and have a type of neography are studied based on the orthography properties and also linguistic features. The results of the analyzing the data and the assigned labels show that neography in Persian in the virtual space occurs at two levels of oryhography and morpho-phonetic, and the content words bear the highest amount of neography in the words.