Blog Corpus Research Articles

Biting into the Bitter Reality: A Metaphorical Exploration of Food Disorders

This study investigated the metaphorical representation of eating disorders in a bilingual corpus of blogs. The analysis yielded three common metaphors: ED IS A JOURNEY; ED IS A WAR and ED IS A CONTAINER. Two language-specific metaphors emerged: ED IS A LIVING ENTITY in the Spanish subcorpus and ED IS A BODY in the English subcorpus. The journey and war metaphors demonstrated subtle linguistic nuances, with the Spanish speakers emphasizing the disease’s challenges and the English speakers emphasizing the prospects for recovery. The specific metaphors ED IS A LIVING ENTITY and ED IS A BODY highlighted cultural variations in agency, with the Spanish speakers portraying themselves as passive sufferers and the English speakers viewing themselves as active agents in the recovery process. This cultural divergence aligns with the distinct value orientations of American and Spanish cultures. While the limited text corpus precludes definitive conclusions, the findings align with previous research on conceptual metaphors in ED discourse. Further investigation is warranted to establish the figurative potential of different languages and determine whether either language employs more metaphors in the ED communicative domain.

CONCEPTUAL “HEART” METAPHORS IN AMERICAN MOMMY BLOGS

Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), this study investigates the use and conceptualization of “heart” metaphors in the self-built corpus of 500 American mommy blog posts in 2021-2022 using some corpus tools namely word sketch and concordance lines. The study aims at exploring the different ways of conceptualizing the metaphorical expressions and the frequency of each category of “heart” metaphor. The results show that HEART IS AN OBJECT is the most common metaphor in the mommy blog corpus, followed by HEART IS A CONTAINER and HEART IS A PERSON.

Cross-linguistic authorship attribution and gender profiling. Machine translation as a method for bridging the language gap

Abstract This study explores the feasibility of cross-linguistic authorship attribution and the author’s gender identification using Machine Translation (MT). Computational stylistics experiments were conducted on a Greek blog corpus translated into English using Google’s Neural MT. A Random Forest algorithm was employed for authorship and gender profiling, using different feature groups [Author’s Multilevel N-gram Profiles, quantitative linguistics (QL), and cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE)] in both original and translated texts. Results indicate that MT is a viable method for converting a multilingual corpus into one language for authorship attribution and gender profiling research, with considerable accuracy when training and testing datasets use identical language. In the pure cross-linguistic scenario, higher accuracies than the baselines were obtained using CLWE and QL features.

Understanding Food Waste in Bulk in Incheon: Based on Naver Blog Big Data

Purpose: This study aims to provide insight into the contemporary food waste issue for the better management of food waste in large quantities in Incheon, one specific region in Korea, based on the analysis of the Naver Blog corpus, employing analysis techniques including text mining and LDA topic modeling.
 Design/methodology/approach: In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives, the current study has employed the R program for the analysis (e.g., TF, tf-idf, correlation, and LDA) of 868 Naver Blog posts which included information about food waste, and/or garbage produced in bulk by foodservice operators in the context of Incheon.
 Findings: The frequently addressed keywords in the dataset include food, waste, garbage, processor, workplace, food waste dewaterer, microorganism, pulverizer, plastic, compressor, restaurant, sink, cafeteria, and bean sprouts. The correlation analysis demonstrated that waste is largely generated by food material, and food material is closely related to specific types of private companies (e.g., cafeterias) and public places (e.g., military bases, prisons, hospi-tals). The LDA identified three topics: the implications for food waste produced by the workplace, recent equipment and technologies used for food waste processing, and effect of waste on the environment and call for remedies.
 Research limitations/implications: While this study has shed light on contemporary issues in relation to food waste in Incheon, it is suggested that the involved parties in the waste management industry pay more attention to the development of effective waste management strategies by hospitality operators in a specific region.
 Originality/value: This study responds to a lack of understanding underpinning foodservice operators who produce a large quantity of food waste in Incheon, albeit much attention has been paid to some recent research on food waste.

Lost in a sea of highlight reels: The use of social media and mental health metaphors in online health blogs

This article explores the metaphorical conceptualisation of social media and its relationship with mental health and well-being in a specialised corpus of online health blogs, with the aim of discovering how people communicate their experience of social media use, and whether it has a positive or negative influence in their lives. For this purpose, a 20,000-word corpus of blog posts from online health communities, charities and personal blogs were collected and analysed. The main research questions are: a) How is social media conceptualised? b) Are metaphors used to conceptualise social media evaluative? c) How are mental health and well-being conceptualised? d) How are metaphors used to discuss the benefits and challenges of social media use for individuals who suffer from illness? Results show that the DRUGS, PLACE, PATH and FOOD source domains are used to conceptualise social media, and that metaphor is used to highlight both the positive impact of social media in providing social support and its negative impact on symptoms when used excessively.

블로그 코퍼스 기반 여행지 다차원 이미지 자동 측정 연구

The aim of this study is to propose an exploratory methodology for automatically estimating multi-dimensional images of travel destinations based on unsupervised learning using a large-scale travel blog corpus so that it can be used for longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. First literature reviews on the construal level theory conducted to clarify the relationship between the travel experiencer's level of travel destination interpretation and potential travelers' travel destination selection decision-making and instead of surveys, the value of travel blogs as message information on the travel experiencer's travel destination interpretation are useful data resource for automatically estimating multi-dimensional images was discussed. Next, by applying web crawling, natural language processing technology and the unsupervised learning-based machine learning algorithm principal component analysis, the frequency of co-occurrence of the travel destination named entity-subjective adjective pair is vectorized to estimate the multi-dimensional images of travel destinations, and visualize the image property structure of individual travel destinations through network centrality analysis by referring to the destination image attributes of Echtner and Ritchier (2003). Finally, the validity of this methodology was demonstrated by applying to the case of Changwon. The results of this study can contribute to gaining insight in making demand-oriented regional tourism vitalization policy decision-making and can be used for large-scale travel blogs corpus-based convergence follow-up studies.

The discourse of minimalist lifestyle: A corpus-based approach

The climate crisis era has seen an upsurge in popular cultural narratives that implicitly challenge principles of economic productivity, consumption and growth by deploring a so-called ‘world of too much’. This article discusses minimalism as examples of anti-consumer-oriented social practices and investigates how the notion of minimalism is represented in a large corpus of English language blogs. The research employs the corpus-linguistics approach of critical discourse analysis. The article argues that discourse of minimalism is paradoxical in that it resists yet at the same time promotes capitalist cultures of growth. In a broader perspective, it constitutes a niche and subversive phenomenon efficiently integrated into the market logic that is seemingly contested by minimalists. On the other hand, it cannot be discredited as a means towards redefining oneself and form of individual conversion. It can result in a new sensitivity to the challenges of late modernity.

The Wikipedia imaginaire: a new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)

This paper presents a media biography of Wikipedia’s data that focuses on the interpretative flexibility of Wikipedia and digital knowledge between the years 2001 and 2022. To do so, I not only follow a strand of media historians who argue that the imagination is an important component for understanding how media change, but I also argue that Wikipedia’s data has been incorporated, re-imagined, and repurposed by sociotechnical projects in ways that have often been side-lined despite acting as the boundary lines of what is considered digital knowledge. It combines Patrice Flichy’s longitudinal theory of technical development as an imaginaire, Frederik Lesage and Simone Natale’s historical approach of biographies of media with an analysis of the interpretative flexibility of new media. Through an eclectic corpus of project websites, new articles, press releases, and blogs, I demonstrate the unexpected ways the online encyclopedia has permeated throughout digital culture over the past twenty years through projects like the Citizendium, Everipedia, Google Search and AI software. As a result of this analysis, I explain how this array of meanings and materials constitutes the Wikipedia imaginaire: a collective activity of sociotechnical development that is fundamental to understanding the ideological and utopian meaning of knowledge with digital culture.

Adjectives and adverbs as stylometric analysis parameters

The present study considers the role of adjectives and adverbs in stylometric analysis and authorship attribution. Adjectives and adverbs allow both for variations in placement and order (adverbs) and variations in type (adjectives). This preliminary study examines a collection of 25 English-language blogs taken from the Schler Blog corpus, and the Project Gutenberg corpus with specific emphasis on 3 works. Within the blog corpora, the first and last 100 lines were extracted for the purpose of analysis. Project Gutenberg corpora were used in full. All texts were processed and part-of-speech tagged using the Python NLTK package. All adverbs were classified as sentence-initial, preverbal, interverbal, postverbal, sentence-final, or none-of-the-above. The adjectives were classified into types according to the universal English type hierarchy (Cambridge Dictionary Online, 2021; Annear, 1964) manually by one of the authors. Ambiguous adjectives were classified according to their context. For the adverbs, the initial samples were paired and used as training data to attribute the final samples. This resulted in 600 trials under each of five experimental conditions. We were able to attribute authorship with an average accuracy of 9.7% greater than chance across all five conditions. Confirmatory experiments are ongoing with a larger sample of English-language blogs. This strongly suggests that adverbial placement is a useful and novel idiolectal variable for authorship attribution (Juola et al., 2021). For the adjective, differences were found in the type of adjective used by each author. Percent use of each type varied based upon individual preference and subject-matter (e.g. Moby Dick had a large number of adjectives related to size and color). While adverbial order and placement are highly variable, adjectives are subject to rigid restrictions that are not violated across texts and authors. Stylometric differences in adjective use generally involve the type and category of adjectives preferred by the author. Future investigation will focus, likewise, on whether adverbial variation is similarly analyzable by type and category of adverb.

How is Mental Illness Discursively Constructed and Conceptualized in a Corpus of Online Blogs? A Corpus-Linguistics Case-Study of Discourses on Mental Illness

À travers une série d’analyses quantitatives et qualitatives fondées sur des outils de linguistique de corpus, cet article vise à déterminer si la métaphore conceptuelle the mind / mental self is a brittle object est utilisée pour conceptualiser la maladie mentale dans un corpus de blogs américains en ligne dédiés à ce sujet et, le cas échéant, si les patients et les professionnels et aidants la conceptualisent de façon similaire. Les analyses quantitatives portent sur les mots-clés et leurs fréquences relatives et les analyses qualitatives sur les collocations, les concordances, la prosodie sémantique et les domaines sémantiques les plus fréquemment utilisés pour conceptualiser la maladie mentale. L’étude se conclut par une analyse des métaphores conceptuelles les plus récurrentes dans les discours des patients et des professionnels et aidants et indique que la métaphore conceptuelle the mind / mental self is a brittle object est relativement peu fréquente dans notre corpus pour construire discursivement et conceptualiser la maladie mentale.

Investigating sentiments in Brazilian and German Blogs

Social interactions have changed in recent years. People post their thoughts, opinions and sentiments on social media platforms more often, through images and videos, providing a very rich source of data about population of different countries, communities, etc. Due to the increase in the amount of data on the internet, it becomes impossible to perform any analysis in a manual manner, requiring the automation of the process. In this work, we use two blog corpora that contain images and texts. Cross-Media German Blog (CGB) corpus consists of German blog posts, while Cross-Media Brazilian Blog (CBB) contains Brazilian blog posts. Both blogs have the Ground Truth (GT) of images and texts feelings (sentiments), classified according to human perceptions. In previous work, Machine Learning and lexicons technologies were applied to both corpora to detect the sentiments (negative, neutral or positive) of images and texts and compare the results with ground truth (based on subjects perception). In this work, we investigated a new hypothesis, by detecting faces and their emotions, to improve the sentiment classification accuracy in both CBB and CGB datasets. We use two methodologies to detect polarity on the faces and evaluated the results with the images GT and the multimodal GT (the complete blog using text and image). Our results indicate that the facial emotion can be a relevant feature in the classification of blogs sentiment.

Pieturzīmes emuāros

On the internet, people can reach an audience in the way they want, for example, through social media. A blog is a website, often updated daily, in which users write about their thoughts or experiences relating to a subject. Nowadays, blogs have various functions: informational, entertaining, and communicative. Blogs can include texts, photos, videos, and links to other blogs. Writing a blog is subordinate to its audience. Readers ask questions on various issues in the comments. Punctuation marks are used to express emotions and attitudes in the text. The aim is to examine the use of punctuation marks – exclamation marks, question marks, ellipsis, dashes, and double quotation marks – in Latvian authors’ blogs. The empirical base of the study consists of about 500 units of broad syntactic constructions, which have been extracted manually and from the “Latvian Language Blog Corpus”. 27 personal, one woman + man blog, and five cooperative blogs have been examined. Attention is paid to punctuation marks used in blogs and commentaries of blogs in various syntactic constructions, e.g., utterances and parenthesis. The study uses descriptive, comparative, and quantitative research methods. A quantitative analysis of the blog entries shows that expressive use of graphical means is more frequent in personal blogs. Bloggers use emoticons in personal and cooperative blogs.

Enemies or obstacles?

Abstract This study examines the use of metaphors of war and journey in a million-word corpus of Spanish-language blogs written by patients with severe mental disorders and by mental health professionals. Quantitative results indicate that both metaphors are more prevalent among patients than professionals, supporting the idea that they are mostly used in this context for communicating complex and emotionally intense experiences. From a qualitative perspective, our results show that patients use both metaphors to deal with exactly the same ontological elements of the situation (the disorder, symptoms, negative emotions, everyday problems, social prejudice, medical activity, people close to the patients and the patients themselves) but framing them differently. Further analysis shows that both metaphors have positive and negative uses in terms of emotions conveyed, empowerment and suitability for coping with the situation. In light of this, we conclude with a discussion of proposals promoting the positive uses of these metaphors.

Differential Use of Reporting Verbs in Academic Papers and Personal Blogs

Appropriate use of reporting verbs plays an important role in building arguments in academic writing. Many studies have investigated the use of reporting verbs in academic writing, but little attention has been paid to the comparison of reporting verb use in academic writing with more informal writing. To address this research gap, this study aims to compare the use of reporting verbs in academic writing and in blog writing. Two comparable academic and blog corpora were prepared: the academic corpus with 150 articles of 1,219,659 tokens and the blog corpus with 379 blogs of 1,573,764 tokens. The frequency ratios of reporting verbs and their functions, based on Thompson’s (1994) classification of reporting verbs, were examined. The blog corpus was found to have more reporting verbs by token frequency, but the normalized blog/academic ratio and academic/blog ratio indicates that many reporting verbs used in blog writing were not frequently used in academic writing. Furthermore, academic writers used reporting verbs to refer to the evidence of their claims while blog writers used them to describe the manner of speaking. The results of this study suggest that types and functions of reporting verb should be considered when integrating blog writing into academic writing.

Binary background model with geometric mean for author-independent authorship verification

Authorship verification (AV) is one of the main problems of authorship analysis and digital text forensics. The classical AV problem is to decide whether or not a particular author wrote the document in question. However, if there is one and relatively short document as the author’s known document, the verification problem becomes more difficult than the classical AV and needs a generalised solution. Regarding to decide AV of the given two unlabeled documents (2D-AV), we proposed a system that provides an author-independent solution with the help of a Binary Background Model (BBM). The BBM is a supervised model that provides an informative background to distinguish document pairs written by the same or different authors. To evaluate the document pairs in one representation, we also proposed a new, simple and efficient document combination method based on the geometric mean of the stylometric features. We tested the performance of the proposed system for both author-dependent and author-independent AV cases. In addition, we introduced a new, well-defined, manually labelled Turkish blog corpus to be used in subsequent studies about authorship analysis. Using a publicly available English blog corpus for generating the BBM, the proposed system demonstrated an accuracy of over 90% from both trained and unseen authors’ test sets. Furthermore, the proposed combination method and the system using the BBM with the English blog corpus were also evaluated with other genres, which were used in the international PAN AV competitions, and achieved promising results.

Literary Genre Recognition among Polish Blog Posts

Robust methods have been proposed for content and topic-based text classification, as well authorship attribution in stylometry. However, the problem of a fine-grained literary genre (style) recognition is much less studied. We present several approaches to the recognition of eight literary genres manually annotated in a large corpus of Polish blogs. Different text representations were combined with neural network classifiers, including deep, recursive neural networks. Very good results were achieved for the representation of blog posts with the help of pre-trained fastText word embeddings and the Bi-GRU recursive deep neural network as a classifier. As the observed good performance of this classifier could be a result of topical bias across genres, experiments on a selected sub-corpus with a reduced dominance of the most frequent topic were also conducted with no significant change observed.

BLURRING THE LINES BETWEEN GENRES AND AUDIENCES: INTERACTION IN SCIENCE BLOGS

Science blogs have been attracting the attention of linguists, rhetoricians and communications scholars alike as the discourse of science becomes more and more influenced by new digital media and more scientists engage in the practice of blogging for the purposes of knowledge dissemination and public engagement. The paper analyses writer-reader interaction in a corpus of blogs maintained by individual scientists, considering both posts and comments. The analysis is corpus-driven to the extent that it harnesses corpus linguistic tools for frequency observations to detect language patterns of interaction, but tries to interpret frequency in light of linguistic and rhetorical models of audience engagement in science popularization. The findings confirm a tendency of blogs to exploit all of the linguistic strategies of audience involvement already found in the literature, reader pronouns, questions and the conversational style typical of spoken science communication, testifying to the blurring of genres and audiences.

Exploring the cultural conceptualization of emotions across national language varieties

Abstract Supporting the hypothesis that emotions are culturally constructed, this article compares the cultural conceptualization of pride in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP). Individualistic/collectivistic as well as other cultural influences that determine the conceptual variation of pride in pluricentric Portuguese are examined. Adopting a sociocognitive view of language and applying a multifactorial usage-feature and profile-based methodology, this study combines a feature-based qualitative analysis of 500 occurrences of orgulho ‘pride’ and vaidade ‘vanity’ from a corpus of blogs with their subsequent multivariate statistic modeling. The multiple correspondence analysis reveals two clusters of features, namely, self-centered pride and other-directed pride. Logistic regression confirmed that EP appears to be more associated with other-directed pride, which is in line with the more collectivist and restrained Portuguese culture, whereas BP is more connected with self-centered pride. Accordingly, morally good pride is salient in EP. Brazil’s high power distance can also explain the prominence of negative and bad pride in BP.

How does ‘bring’ (not) change to ‘give’?

Abstract This paper investigates a semantic change from ‘bring’ to ‘give’, and the language-specific factors that determine when it may happen. Drawing on a corpus of blogs and an acceptability judgment experiment, we demonstrate an ongoing change in the meaning of the Hebrew verb hevi, usually glossed as ‘bring’: older speakers are more likely to use hevi for unambiguous bring events, whereas younger speakers are more likely to use it in contexts also compatible with give events, although not in the full range of ‘give’ contexts. We argue that this change is facilitated by the specific discourse profile associated with the verb hevi: (1) frequent uses of hevi in the Goal-theme construction, the Hebrew functional equivalent of the English double object construction, creating a “bridging context” for semantic change (2) frequent uses of hevi in which there is no real-world motion, facilitating the bleaching of the ‘agent motion’ component. We then examine the English verb bring, which is not undergoing a similar change, and demonstrate that it has a different discourse profile (namely, far fewer double object constructions and no-motion uses). Thus, while a ‘bring’>‘give’ change is well-motivated and potentially possible, the factors enabling it to actually happen are determined by the predominant discourse pattern characteristic of the verb.

Coping by metaphors: the versatile function of metaphors in blogs about living with advanced cancer

Living with a life-limiting cancer illness can entail a turmoil of feelings such as constant fear of loss, suffering and dying. Because patients live longer with life-limiting illness, there is...