M Taboada
Biographic Data
| ID | 9003 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Taboada |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Taboada |
| SIGNATURE | TABOADA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6750-8891 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 171 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Conflicting feelings: Sociological and computational sentiment in workplace sentiment surveillance
The ‘adverb-ly adjective’ construction in English: Meanings, distribution and discourse functions
We investigate a class of adjective phrases composed of a deadjectival adverb ending in -ly and an adjective head (e.g. staggeringly incompetent , absolutely terrific , fiscally responsible ), a compact construction whereby two adjectives may jointly contribute to evaluative meaning. Using corpus methodologies on more than 1 million examples and relying on semantic analyses of about 1,000 instances, we propose that the construction can be divided…
Linguistic approaches to fake news research are growing and maturing: Commentary on a special issue
This first special issue of Linguistics Vanguard on the language of fake news offers multiple perspectives on the linguistic analysis of fake news and misinformation, with a range of approaches and methodologies, showing the sophistication and maturity of the field. The study of fake news is a flourishing area of research, with contributions from communication, media studies, data science, and natural language processing. The growing body of rese…
Reported speech and gender in the news: Who is quoted, how are they quoted, and why it matters
News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respec…
Topic modelling is a means to an end: On topic modelling in corpus linguistics and discourse analysis
Classifying constructive comments
We introduce the Constructive Comments Corpus (C3), comprised of 12,000 annotated news comments, intended to help build new tools for online communities to improve the quality of their discussions. We define constructive comments as high-quality comments that make a contribution to the conversation. We explain the crowd worker annotation scheme and de ne a taxonomy of subcharacteristics of constructiveness. The quality of the annotation scheme an…
Spontaneous and non-spontaneous turn-taking
Turn-taking is usually considered to follow a simple set of rules, enacted through a perhaps more complicated system of signals. The most significant aspect of the turn-taking process is that, in most cases, it proceeds in a very smooth fashion. Speakers signal to each other that they wish to either yield or take the turn through syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic means. In this paper, I explore how the turn-taking process develops in two differe…
Los discursos de género, violencia y desigualdad social en la era de la comunicación (digital)
Este volumen tiene como objetivo estudiar y analizar los discursos públicos en torno al género, la violencia y la desigualdad social en los llamados medios digitales (Couldry 2012) y, más concretamente, su evolución e impacto político, cultural, social e ideológico en la era digital y las ‘nuevas’ formas de comunicación social, institucional y política (Fuchs 2007; Bennet & Segerberg 2013; Winseck 2017). La edición pretende profundizar en los dis…
Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments in English and Russian
We investigate the relationship between Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments by analyzing the frequency and type of Engagement expressions in a corpus of English and Russian comments, following the Appraisal framework. The comments in question, 10,000 words in each language, were posted in response to opinion articles in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail and the Russian online news channel RT . In the context of online …
Concession strategies in online newspaper comments
The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse
This paper brings together cutting-edge, quantitative corpus methodologies and discourse analysis to explore the relationship between text complexity and subjectivity as descriptive features of opinionated language. We are specifically interested in how text complexity and markers of subjectivity and argumentation interact in opinionated discourse. Our contributions include the marriage of quantitative approaches to text complexity with corpus li…
The space of coherence relations and their signalling in discourse
I present an overview of the concept of coherence in discourse and explore how one of the essential elements to that coherence, relational coherence, has been studied and partitioned in different discourse traditions. I then introduce one of the theories that deals with discourse coherence, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Through the description of RST, I investigate fundamental concepts in the study of coherence relations such as the classifi…
Teaching linguistic argumentation through a writing-intensive approach
We present the results of a study on whether writing-intensive learning techniques can assist beginner students in learning linguistic argumentation. The analysis is based on student submissions (eighty submissions from twenty students, 22,328 words) from a typical Introduction to Linguistics course, which were analyzed with the Coh-Metrix tool (McNamara et al. 2014), a suite of tests that measures cohesion of the linguistic formulation of the te…
Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection
Fake news has become an important topic of research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics and computer science. In this paper, we explain how the problem is approached from the perspective of natural language processing, with the goal of building a system to automatically detect misinformation in news. The main challenge in this line of research is collecting quality data, i.e., instances of fake and real news articles on a balanced d…
Introduction to the Special Issue on Language in Social Media: Exploiting Discourse and Other Contextual Information
Social media content is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects, and past experiences. Most social media texts are short online conversational posts or comments that do not contain enough information for natural language processing (NLP) tools, as they are often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual information, including meta-data (e.g., the user’s profi…
Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, Beyond Discourse Markers
We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as Concession or Purpose) are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) re…
Evaluation in political discourse addressed to women: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s online coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections
Evaluative Language Beyond Bags of Words: Linguistic Insights and Computational Applications
The study of evaluation, affect, and subjectivity is a multidisciplinary enterprise, including sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, and computer science. A number of excellent computational linguistics and linguistic surveys of the field exist. Most surveys, however, do not bring the two disciplines together to show how methods from linguistics can benefit computational sentiment analysis systems. In this survey, we show how incorporati…
Cataphora, backgrounding and accessibility in discourse
Sentiment Analysis: An Overview from Linguistics
Sentiment analysis is a growing field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science that attempts to automatically determine the sentiment contained in text. Sentiment can be characterized as positive or negative evaluation expressed through language. Common applications of sentiment analysis include the automatic determination of whether a review posted online (of a movie, a book, or a consumer product) is positive or negative toward t…
Rhetorical relations in multimodal documents
We present a corpus-based study of coherence in multimodal documents. We concern ourselves with the types of relationships between graphs and tables and the text of the document in which they appear. In order to understand and categorize the types of relations across modalities, we are making use of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), and propose that this can adequately describe these types of relations. We analyzed a corpus c…
The contribution of nonveridical rhetorical relations to evaluation in discourse
Stages in an online review genre
Genre, from the Systemic Functional Linguistics point of view, refers to the organization of any speech activity in stages, determined by the overall purpose of the genre and by social conventions. In this paper, the SFL approach to genre and register is applied to the genre of online movie reviews. A corpus analysis shows specific stages in the genre: Descriptive stages (in turn, Subject Matter, Plot, Characters and Background) and an obligatory…
Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis
We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show …
Subjects and topics in conversation
Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis
We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show …
Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations
Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking Back and Moving Ahead
Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, tog…
Sentiment Analysis: An Overview from Linguistics
Sentiment analysis is a growing field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science that attempts to automatically determine the sentiment contained in text. Sentiment can be characterized as positive or negative evaluation expressed through language. Common applications of sentiment analysis include the automatic determination of whether a review posted online (of a movie, a book, or a consumer product) is positive or negative toward t…
Applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this article, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the RST framework. The present article is a comp…
Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, Beyond Discourse Markers
We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as Concession or Purpose) are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) re…
Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection
Fake news has become an important topic of research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics and computer science. In this paper, we explain how the problem is approached from the perspective of natural language processing, with the goal of building a system to automatically detect misinformation in news. The main challenge in this line of research is collecting quality data, i.e., instances of fake and real news articles on a balanced d…
Evaluative Language Beyond Bags of Words: Linguistic Insights and Computational Applications
The study of evaluation, affect, and subjectivity is a multidisciplinary enterprise, including sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, and computer science. A number of excellent computational linguistics and linguistic surveys of the field exist. Most surveys, however, do not bring the two disciplines together to show how methods from linguistics can benefit computational sentiment analysis systems. In this survey, we show how incorporati…
Rhetorical relations in multimodal documents
We present a corpus-based study of coherence in multimodal documents. We concern ourselves with the types of relationships between graphs and tables and the text of the document in which they appear. In order to understand and categorize the types of relations across modalities, we are making use of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), and propose that this can adequately describe these types of relations. We analyzed a corpus c…
The contribution of nonveridical rhetorical relations to evaluation in discourse
Subjects and topics in conversation
Introduction to the Special Issue on Language in Social Media: Exploiting Discourse and Other Contextual Information
Social media content is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects, and past experiences. Most social media texts are short online conversational posts or comments that do not contain enough information for natural language processing (NLP) tools, as they are often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual information, including meta-data (e.g., the user’s profi…
Cataphora, backgrounding and accessibility in discourse
Reported speech and gender in the news: Who is quoted, how are they quoted, and why it matters
News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respec…
Concession strategies in online newspaper comments
Evaluation in political discourse addressed to women: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s online coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections
Rhetorical and thematic patterns in scheduling dialogues: A generic characterization
This paper provides a corpus-based generic characterization of appointment-scheduling dialogues — a type of task-oriented conversation — by concentrating on the rhetorical and thematic choices made by the speakers that produce them. The analytical tools used for this study are Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the notion of Theme as defined in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Thematic Progression (TP) patterns. The results of the corpus anal…
Applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this article, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the RST framework. The present article is a comp…
Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking Back and Moving Ahead
Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, tog…
Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations
Subjects and topics in conversation
Stages in an online review genre
Genre, from the Systemic Functional Linguistics point of view, refers to the organization of any speech activity in stages, determined by the overall purpose of the genre and by social conventions. In this paper, the SFL approach to genre and register is applied to the genre of online movie reviews. A corpus analysis shows specific stages in the genre: Descriptive stages (in turn, Subject Matter, Plot, Characters and Background) and an obligatory…
Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis
We present a lexicon-based approach to extracting sentiment from text. The Semantic Orientation CALculator (SO-CAL) uses dictionaries of words annotated with their semantic orientation (polarity and strength), and incorporates intensification and negation. SO-CAL is applied to the polarity classification task, the process of assigning a positive or negative label to a text that captures the text's opinion towards its main subject matter. We show …
The contribution of nonveridical rhetorical relations to evaluation in discourse
Rhetorical relations in multimodal documents
We present a corpus-based study of coherence in multimodal documents. We concern ourselves with the types of relationships between graphs and tables and the text of the document in which they appear. In order to understand and categorize the types of relations across modalities, we are making use of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), and propose that this can adequately describe these types of relations. We analyzed a corpus c…
Sentiment Analysis: An Overview from Linguistics
Sentiment analysis is a growing field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science that attempts to automatically determine the sentiment contained in text. Sentiment can be characterized as positive or negative evaluation expressed through language. Common applications of sentiment analysis include the automatic determination of whether a review posted online (of a movie, a book, or a consumer product) is positive or negative toward t…
Evaluative Language Beyond Bags of Words: Linguistic Insights and Computational Applications
The study of evaluation, affect, and subjectivity is a multidisciplinary enterprise, including sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, and computer science. A number of excellent computational linguistics and linguistic surveys of the field exist. Most surveys, however, do not bring the two disciplines together to show how methods from linguistics can benefit computational sentiment analysis systems. In this survey, we show how incorporati…
Cataphora, backgrounding and accessibility in discourse
Evaluation in political discourse addressed to women: Appraisal analysis of Cosmopolitan’s online coverage of the 2014 US midterm elections
Introduction to the Special Issue on Language in Social Media: Exploiting Discourse and Other Contextual Information
Social media content is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects, and past experiences. Most social media texts are short online conversational posts or comments that do not contain enough information for natural language processing (NLP) tools, as they are often accompanied by non-linguistic contextual information, including meta-data (e.g., the user’s profi…
Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, Beyond Discourse Markers
We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as Concession or Purpose) are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) re…
The space of coherence relations and their signalling in discourse
I present an overview of the concept of coherence in discourse and explore how one of the essential elements to that coherence, relational coherence, has been studied and partitioned in different discourse traditions. I then introduce one of the theories that deals with discourse coherence, Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Through the description of RST, I investigate fundamental concepts in the study of coherence relations such as the classifi…
Teaching linguistic argumentation through a writing-intensive approach
We present the results of a study on whether writing-intensive learning techniques can assist beginner students in learning linguistic argumentation. The analysis is based on student submissions (eighty submissions from twenty students, 22,328 words) from a typical Introduction to Linguistics course, which were analyzed with the Coh-Metrix tool (McNamara et al. 2014), a suite of tests that measures cohesion of the linguistic formulation of the te…
Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection
Fake news has become an important topic of research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics and computer science. In this paper, we explain how the problem is approached from the perspective of natural language processing, with the goal of building a system to automatically detect misinformation in news. The main challenge in this line of research is collecting quality data, i.e., instances of fake and real news articles on a balanced d…
Los discursos de género, violencia y desigualdad social en la era de la comunicación (digital)
Este volumen tiene como objetivo estudiar y analizar los discursos públicos en torno al género, la violencia y la desigualdad social en los llamados medios digitales (Couldry 2012) y, más concretamente, su evolución e impacto político, cultural, social e ideológico en la era digital y las ‘nuevas’ formas de comunicación social, institucional y política (Fuchs 2007; Bennet & Segerberg 2013; Winseck 2017). La edición pretende profundizar en los dis…
Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments in English and Russian
We investigate the relationship between Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments by analyzing the frequency and type of Engagement expressions in a corpus of English and Russian comments, following the Appraisal framework. The comments in question, 10,000 words in each language, were posted in response to opinion articles in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail and the Russian online news channel RT . In the context of online …
Concession strategies in online newspaper comments
The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse
This paper brings together cutting-edge, quantitative corpus methodologies and discourse analysis to explore the relationship between text complexity and subjectivity as descriptive features of opinionated language. We are specifically interested in how text complexity and markers of subjectivity and argumentation interact in opinionated discourse. Our contributions include the marriage of quantitative approaches to text complexity with corpus li…
Spontaneous and non-spontaneous turn-taking
Turn-taking is usually considered to follow a simple set of rules, enacted through a perhaps more complicated system of signals. The most significant aspect of the turn-taking process is that, in most cases, it proceeds in a very smooth fashion. Speakers signal to each other that they wish to either yield or take the turn through syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic means. In this paper, I explore how the turn-taking process develops in two differe…
Classifying constructive comments
We introduce the Constructive Comments Corpus (C3), comprised of 12,000 annotated news comments, intended to help build new tools for online communities to improve the quality of their discussions. We define constructive comments as high-quality comments that make a contribution to the conversation. We explain the crowd worker annotation scheme and de ne a taxonomy of subcharacteristics of constructiveness. The quality of the annotation scheme an…
Reported speech and gender in the news: Who is quoted, how are they quoted, and why it matters
News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respec…
Linguistics (24 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (12 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (9 works) · Rhetorical question (9 works)