Linguistic complexity and engagement in social media communication for cultural heritage

This contribution has the dual goal of testing the usage of readability and lexical complexity tools in social media writing and analyzing the relationship between linguistic complexity, cultural topics, and social engagement. A corpus of tweets from the official Twitter page of the Italian Ministry of Culture has been stored together with available information on social engagement. once the tweets have been properly processed with standard Natural language processing tasks, linguistic complexity is measured with eight readability and lexical diversity indicators developed outside the social media context. Topic modeling is then carried out through the LDA technique. An explorative study of cause-effect relationships between lexical complexity, topic grouping, and engagement measures is performed by using a PlS-PM mixed approach.