Terminology in tourism 2.0: identification of the categories in user generated reviews

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of consumer-generated reviews dealing on travel websites and the use of terminology. The objectives of this paper are first, to study the categories more commonly used in consumer reviews, second, to analyse the use of borrowings and neologisms in consumer reviews and finally, to identify the different words used by consumer reviewers to refer to the same concept and the reason of this variety. In order to reach these objectives, a corpus of two hundred consumer reviews written in Spanish by users of an online platform was compiled. On the one hand, the terms were identified and classified attending to semantic criteria and their level of specialisation. On the other, the borrowings and neologisms were identified in the corpus, being selected and classified studying the variation of terms. Then, the results were extracted and discussed and finally, conclusions were drawn.