It can be hard to keep up with slang; just last year government-run website Parent Info released a list of teen jargon that contained outdated phrases like "zerging" -- which means, apparently "to gang up on".
Now Facebook has its own idea on how to keep up with the latest teen lexicography: a new patent outlines a process that would scan the site for slang and then upload it to a "social glossary".
In the patent filed in February, Facebook details a "social glossary" that will scan posts on the site looking for "slang, terms of art, portmanteaus, syllabic abbreviations, abbreviations, acronyms, names, nicknames, re-purposed words or phrases, or any other type of coined word or phrase". These phrases will then be added to the glossary.
Facebook uses the example of rickrolling to describe the process. "If a particular textual term "rickrolled" was added to the social glossary as a verb related to an action that one user can perform upon another user, a "rickrolling" edge type may be added to the social graph, so as to capture such actions or activity when occurring between users of the social graph." If phrases fall out of favour, they'll be removed, the patent suggests.
The aim would seemingly be to better understand what people are sharing on Facebook, how they react to it and what that data might mean for improving its content algorithms over time. However, as ever with patent documents there is no certainty that any such features will be added to the service -- or at least, not in a form that users would ever notice. Several search engines including Google already track the rise in popularity of new terms and trending searches, in order to showcase more relevant results.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
