Maite Taboada

Amber Rynearson and I presented today at @raammetaphor.bsky.social, on our work trying to integrate different frameworks for metaphor identification.
What a great conference and so well run. Thank you, Hamad @al-azary.bsky.social and team!

It has been a pleasure to present our research in #IPrA2025 at The University of Queensland (Australia).

Thanks, @cliff-goddard.bsky.social and Helen Bromhead (panel organizers), for your interest on our @uneduniv.bsky.social #EUPlainTech project (@ageinves.bsky.social) . 🤗

#PlainLanguage
#NLP

IPrA in 2027 - Helsinki

Nice idea of the organizers of #ipra2025: signs with the first IPrA we attended

In Brisbane for #ipra2025!

📢 19th International Pragmatics Conference
🗓️ June 22–27
🌏 Brisbane
🔗 pragmatics.international/page/Program...

M. Bermúdez, I. da Cunha (@uneduniv.bsky.social) & M. Taboada (@sfulinguistics.bsky.social) will present our #EUPlainTech project (@ageinves.bsky.social).

Oh, wow, Laura and Carmen! Two such lovely people. Say hi!

Talk by Barbara Dancygier, one of the most prominent scholars in cognitive linguistics. And this one is about memes!

Check out the paper, open access!!

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

E.g., here they are compared to other spoken registers. The mean factor scores are similar, but the spread for podcasts (purple box) is huge.

We show that podcasts are an emerging register of computer mediated communication, with lots of internal variability.

Jussi Karlgren, then at Spotify, gave us the idea of working on podcasts and was kind enough to zoom in to our class to give us background on their dataset.

The funny bit of background is that we also brainstormed on that other social media site, appealing to the community of discourse experts to help us come up with interesting data to analyze.

The paper started at a graduate seminar in Fall 2022. All the students in the class collaborated to brainstorm research ideas, collect data, think of methodologies, run analyses, & write up the results. Katharina Ehret, our resident MDA expert, joined later to help us run more analyses.

Another paper a long time in the making:
3️⃣ years
🔟 authors
1️⃣ graduate seminar
9,789 podcast transcripts
1️⃣ paper: doi.org/10.1075/rs.2...

You're welcome! GeMeCo (the Spanish language dashboard) has some IP restrictions because of potential DoS attacks.
the ups and downs are sometimes temporary. The trend line is at about 30%

Informed Opinions has been doing this outstanding advocacy work.
informedopinions.org

2(b). Pressure and praise work... some. We've talked to most of these news outlets and they say they want to do better. Lots of issues:
- The world is the way it is
- Women experts sometimes don't want to talk to the media (leads to online abuse)
- Reporters always have deadline pressures
- ...

2. Yeah, maintenance is an issue. It's not too hard, but it needs regular attention. CTV broke recently and we're still working on the fix. I am lucky that @sfu.ca supports this project and thankful that the talented folks at www.rcg.sfu.ca are there for us!

Radar de Parité https://radardeparite.femmesexpertes.ca

Thanks for engaging with this work, @01factory.bsky.social! Some quick answers:
1. Replicated in French and Spanish media:
radardeparite.femmesexpertes.ca
gemeco.ujaen.es

The paper:
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The twists and turns of research: In conversation with Maite Taboada Maite Taboada, Cliff Goddard, and Rada Trnavac recently published a paper that is over a decade in the making. While it isn’t unusual for research to take many years to come to fruition, the story beh...

On how a paper took 10 years, 3 authors, and 3 continents
www.sfu.ca/linguistics/...

Just out! Paper with @corpusling.bsky.social on sentiment analysis in news articles.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

😍

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

3️⃣ The choice between indirect and direct speech may have to do with principles of information structure: how given or new the source is and the informational weight of the quoted content

2️⃣ Indirect speech is much more frequent than direct speech

But I also find out other cool things about the linguistics of quoting:
1️⃣ "say" is by far the most frequent quotative verb

I analyze a full years' worth of news stories and tell you what you already probably know: women are quoted way less than men (and non-binary people are absent)

New paper on who is quoted in the news.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...