The Malaysia Tourism Review Corpus (MaTRiC) was developed as part of a four-year research project (2022–2026) entitled A Discourse-Based Framework of Tourists and Service Providers' Cross-Cultural Understanding towards Tourist Destinations in Malaysia. The project was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) and was carried out at Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. The project was led by Associate Professor Dr. Ali Jalalian Daghigh, with Associate Professor Dr. Sheena Kaur A/P Jaswant Singh and Professor Dr. Salamiah Binti A. Jamal as co-investigators.
One of the primary aims of the project was to examine and document cross-cultural patterns in the ways tourists perceive, describe, and evaluate their experiences in Malaysia. To achieve this aim, the project adopted a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach, with a particular focus on online tourist reviews as naturally occurring, authentic, and unprompted data.
A major output of the project is the Malaysia Tourism Review Corpus (MaTRiC), a validated corpus of online tourist reviews consisting of country-based subcorpora. The corpus was built from reviews posted on TripAdvisor by Malaysian domestic tourists and international tourists visiting Malaysia, covering three major tourism categories: accommodation, activities, and food. The reviews span a twelve-year period, from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2023, and were contributed by tourists from 35 countries. The 35 countries are Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, China Mainland, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.
The corpus-building process involved extensive data collection, cleaning, organisation, and validation. By making MaTRiC available through this website, we hope to support future research on tourism, hospitality, destination image, tourist experience, cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and related areas. Researchers can use the data directly to generate new insights without having to repeat the time-consuming corpus-building process from the beginning.
On this website, you can find more information about the research team, the corpus data, and ways to access and use the corpus.