What Factors Can Facilitate Efficient Propagation of Chinese Neologisms–A Corpus-Driven Study with Internet Usage Data

With the development of information technologies, our world currently faces such an overwhelming mass of neologisms. Therefore, the study of neologisms has become an important research topic in recent years [1]. In this research, we investigate the factors that facilitate the efficient propagation of Chinese neologisms, based on Internet usage data extracted from Google Trends. We collected 342 neologisms from the published authoritative lists and annotated them with eight factors that potentially contribute to their popularity. The empirical findings shed light on the predictive potential of specific factors, such as the topic, syntactic type, length, and semantic polarity of the neologisms. Our investigation further assigns weight to each factor, revealing that syntactic type and semantic polarity of the neologisms exert more pronounced effects on their developments.