In:Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 283–306
Chapter 11Generic analysis of mobile application reviews in English and Spanish
A contrastive corpus-based study
Published online: 8 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.11mor
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.11mor
Abstract
In this paper, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to genre is applied to English and Spanish
mobile application reviews from Google Play Store. These reviews are shown to be divisible into two optional stages, namely Evaluation
and Description, the first part being more subjective and based on the author’s opinion and the second one more objective and focused
on describing issues. The frequency of use of the Attitude axis from Appraisal Theory provides support for the distinction of those
stages. The combination of the polarity of the contents of each stage together with the number of stars given to the item reviewed
creates six patterns for the reviews. However, no noticeable differences between English and Spanish reviews were observed.
Keywords: product reviews, application stores, appraisal theory, genre, SFL
Article outline
- Introduction
- Theoretical framework
- Genre analysis
- Appraisal theory
- The mobile application review genre and the corpus
- General characteristics of mobile application and game reviews
- Comparison with reviews about other products and from other platforms
- Corpus
- Generic stages in mobile application reviews
- Lexicogrammatical features of stages
- Patterns observed in the stages
- Distribution of staging patterns in the English and Spanish corpora
- Most important problems in the (automatic) analysis of application and game reviews
- Summary and concluding remarks
References
References (46)
Argamon, Shlomo, Kenneth Bloom, Andrea Esuli, and Fabrizio Sebastiani. 2007. “Automatically
Determining Attitude Type and Force for Sentiment
Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 3rd Language & Technology Conference
(LTC-07), 218–231.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. 1986. Speech genres and other late
essays, Vern W. McGee (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bhatia, Vijay Kumar. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse: A
Genre-Based View. London: Continuum International.
Das, Sanjiv and Mike Chen. 2001. “Yahoo!
for Amazon: Extracting Market Sentiment from Stock Message
Boards.” In Proceedings of the Asia Pacific Finance Association Annual
Conference APFA, 37–56.
Dave, Kushal, Steve Lawrence, and David M. Pennock. 2003. “Mining
the Peanut Gallery: Opinion Extraction and Semantic Classification of Product
Reviews.” In Proceedings of
WWW, 519–528.
Dini, Luca and Giampaolo Mazzini. 2002. “Opinion
Classification through Information Extraction.” in Proceedings of the
Conference on Data Mining Methods and Databases for Engineering, Finance and Other Fields (Data
Mining), 299–310.
Dotti, Fiorella Carla. 2013. “Overcoming Problems in
Automated Appraisal Recognition: The Attitude System in Inscribed Appraisal.” Procedia-Social and
Behavioral Sciences 95: 442–446.
Eggins, Suzanne. 1994. An
Introduction to Systemic Functional
Linguistics. London: Pinter Publishers.
Eggins, Suzanne and James R. Martin. 1997. “Genres
and registers of discourse”. In Discourse as Structure and Process.
Discourse studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by T. A. van Dijk, 230–256. London: Sage.
Google. (n.d.). Comment
posting policy. Retrieved from <[URL]> (accessed
on November, 2019).
Guzmán, Emitza, and Walid Maalej. 2014. “How
do users like this feature? A fine grained sentiment analysis of app
reviews.” In 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference
(RE). IEEE Press.
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood, and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1985. Language,
context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic
perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Khalid, Hammad. 2013. “On
identifying user complaints of iOS apps.” In Proceedings of the 2013
International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Press.
Khoo, Christopher Soo-Guan, Armineh Nourbakhsh, and Jin-Cheon Na. 2012. “Sentiment
Analysis of Online News Text: A Case Study of Appraisal Theory.” Online Information
Review 36 (6): 858–878.
Liu, Bing. 2010. “Sentiment
analysis and subjectivity.” Handbook of natural language
processing 2: 627–666.
. 2012. “Sentiment
analysis and opinion mining.” Synthesis Lectures on Human Language
Technologies 5 (1): 1–167.
Martin, James R. 1984. “Language, register and
genre.” In Children Writing: Reader, ed.
by F. Christie, 21–30. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
1985. “Process and text: Two aspects of
human semiosis.” In Systemic perspectives on
discourse, ed. by James Benson and William Greaves, 248–274. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
2000. Beyond exchange: Appraisal systems
in English. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Distance and the
Construction of Discourse, ed. by Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson, 142–175. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Martin, James. R. and Peter R. White. 2005. The
Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave.
Mora López, Natalia. 2017. Annotating
Appraisal in English and Spanish product reviews from mobile application stores a contrastive study for linguistic and
computational purposes. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Available online
at <[URL]>
Nasukawa, Tetsuya and Jeonghee Yi. 2003. “Sentiment
Analysis: Capturing Favorability using Natural Language
Processing.” In Proceedings of the Conference on Knowledge Capture
(K-CAP).
Nwogu, Kevin Ngozi. 1997. “The medical research paper:
Structure and functions.” English for Specific
Purposes 16 (2): 119–138.
Pang, Bo, Lillian Lee, and Shivakumar Vaithyanathan. 2002. “Thumbs
Up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning
Techniques.” In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in
Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 79–86.
Pollach, Irene. 2006. “Electronic
word of mouth: a genre analysis of product reviews on consumer opinion web
sites.” In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference
on System Sciences (HICSS’06). IEEE Press.
Skelton, John. 1994. “Analysis
of the structure of original research papers: an aid to writing original papers for
publication.” British Journal of General
Practice 44: 455–459.
Swales, John. 1990. Genre
Analysis. English in Academic and Research
Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taboada, Maite. 2003. “Modeling
task-oriented dialogue.” Computers and the
Humanities 37 (4): 431–454.
. 2004a. Building
Coherence and Cohesion: Task-oriented Dialogue in English and Spanish. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
. 2011. “Stages
in an online review genre.” Text & Talk-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse
& Communication
Studies 31 (2): 247–269.
Taboada, Maite and Jack Grieve. 2004. “Analyzing
Appraisal Automatically.” American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on
Exploring Attitude and Affect in
Text. Stanford. March 2004. AAAI
Technical Report SS-04-07, 158–161.
Taboada, Maite, and Julia Lavid. 2003. “Rhetorical
and thematic patterns in scheduling dialogues: A generic characterization.” Functions of
Language 10 (2): 147–179.
Taboada, Maite, Julian Brooke, and Manfred Stede. 2009. “Genre-Based
Paragraph Classification for Sentiment Analysis.” In Proceedings of 10th
Annual SIGDIAL Conference on Discourse and Dialogue. London, UK. September 2009, 62–70.
Turney, Peter D. 2002. “Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down? Semantic
Orientation Applied to Unsupervised Classification of
Reviews.” In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(ACL), 417–424.
Vasa, Rajesh, Leonard Hoon, Kon Mouzakis, and Akihiro Noguchi. 2012. “A
preliminary analysis of mobile app user reviews.” Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human
Interaction Conference. ACM.
Vásquez, Camilla. 2012. “Narrativity
and involvement in online consumer reviews: The case of TripAdvisor.” Narrative
Inquiry 22(1): 105–121.
White, Peter R. 2003. “Beyond modality and hedging: A
dialogic view of the language of intersubjective
stance.” Text, 23(2): 259–284.
Whitelaw, Casey, Navendu Garg, and Shlomo Argamon. 2005. “Using
Appraisal Groups for Sentiment Analysis.” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
(CIKM), 625–631.
Wiebe, Janyce M. 1994. “Tracking point of view in
narrative.” Computational
Linguistics 20 (2): 233–287.
Wiebe, Janyce M., Eric Breck, Chris Buckley, Claire Cardie, Paul Davis, Bruce Fraser, Diane J. Litman, David R. Pierce, Ellen Riloff, and Theresa Wilson. 2003. “Recognizing
and Organizing Opinions Expressed in the World Press.” In Proceedings of
the AAAI Spring Symposium on New Directions in Question
Answering, 12–19.
