Frequently asked
questions

The Malaysia Tourism Review Corpus (MaTRiC) is a validated corpus of online tourist reviews on Malaysian tourism destinations. It was developed as part of the research project entitled A Discourse-based Framework of Tourists and Service Providers' Cross-cultural Understanding towards Tourist Destinations in Malaysia. The corpus was built from TripAdvisor reviews posted by Malaysian domestic tourists and international tourists visiting Malaysia, covering three major tourism categories: accommodation, activities, and food. It consists of 35 country-based subcorpora, contains approximately 38 million words, and covers a twelve-year period, from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2023.

MaTRiC was built through a combination of computational and manual procedures. Reviews were first collected using automated web-crawling techniques, which enabled the research team to gather large-scale online review data from TripAdvisor. The research team then manually cleaned, organised, and validated the collected data by checking for and addressing issues such as duplicated reviews, incomplete reviews, irrelevant reviews, and gibberish. This process helped ensure that the corpus was ready for research use.

MaTRiC is made available free of charge for research and educational purposes. Users are expected to acknowledge the corpus when using it in presentations, theses, dissertations, reports, journal articles, conference papers, books, book chapters, or other research outputs. You can access MaTRiC through the Corpus Data page of this website. Each country-based subcorpus is listed separately and can be downloaded through the link provided. You must sign in with a free account before downloading.

Each subcorpus represents reviews posted by tourists from a specific country. For example, the United Kingdom subcorpus contains reviews posted by tourists from the United Kingdom, while the China Mainland subcorpus contains reviews posted by tourists from China Mainland. The subcorpora differ mainly in terms of the country-based grouping of reviewers and corpus size.

Please use the following acknowledgement when using the corpus:

The data were obtained from the Malaysia Tourism Review Corpus (MaTRiC). Available at: www.touristcorpusmalaysia.com. All rights in the corpus data are reserved.

MaTRiC can be analysed using corpus and text analysis software such as AntConc, Wmatrix, WordSmith Tools, #LancsBox X, and Sketch Engine, among others. After downloading the relevant subcorpus, users can import the text files into their chosen software for analysis.

Researchers may use MaTRiC for different types of corpus-assisted analysis. Common analytical techniques include frequency analysis (identifying the most frequently used words or expressions), n-gram analysis (examining repeated word sequences), keyword analysis (identifying words that are statistically overused or underused in one subcorpus compared with another corpus), key semantic domain analysis (identifying meaning areas that are unusually prominent in a corpus), collocation analysis (examining words that frequently occur together), and concordance analysis (examining words or phrases in their surrounding context).

Yes. Researchers may use the full MaTRiC corpus or select one or more country-based subcorpora depending on their research aims. For example, a researcher may focus only on the China Mainland subcorpus, compare the United States and China Mainland subcorpora, combine subcorpora representing Eastern and Western tourist groups for comparison, or combine all available subcorpora to analyse MaTRiC as a whole.

No. MaTRiC is provided for research and educational use. Users should not redistribute, republish, sell, or upload the corpus data to another public platform. Other researchers should be directed to this website to access the corpus. If you have further questions about the corpus, please contact Associate Professor Dr. Ali Jalalian Daghigh or Associate Professor Dr. Sheena Kaur through the contact information provided in the website footer.