Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

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Abstract

News organisations often allow public comments at the bottom of their news stories. These comments constitute a fruitful source of data to investigate linguistic variation online; their characteristics, however, are rather understudied. This paper thus contributes to the description of online news comments and online language in English. In this spirit, we apply multi-dimensional analysis to a large dataset of online news comments and compare them to a corpus of online registers, thus placing online comments in the space of register variation online. We find that online news comments are involved-evaluative and informational at the same time, but mostly argumentative in nature, with such argumentation taking an informal shape. Our analyses lead us to conclude that online registers are a different mode of communication, neither spoken nor written, with individual variation across different types of online registers.

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Ehret, K., & Taboada, M. (2021). Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2021.643770

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