the Internet ( Colbath , 2012 ) . Social media poses three major computational challenges , dubbed by Gartner the 3Vs of big data : volume , velocity , and variety1 . Natural Language Processing ( NLP ) methods , in particular , face further difficulties arising from the short , noisy , and strongly contextualised nature of social media . In order to address the 3Vs of social media , new language technologies have emerged , such as the identification and definition of users ' language varieties and the translation to a different language , than the source .