This blog piece will introduce a relatively new method in the study of language – the corpus linguistic approach – and talk about how it can be useful for linguistic researchers interested in analysing communication in healthcare environments. To do this, this entry will ask – and answer – three questions: (i) What is corpus linguistics? (ii) What does a corpus linguistic analysis look like? and (iii) What can corpus linguistics offer to healthcare research?

What is corpus linguistics?
Corpus linguistics is a collection of methods that involve using specialist computer programs to study large amounts of texts or language data. This collection of language is known as a corpus (plural corpora) – the Latin for ‘body’. The corpora that corpus linguists analyse are usually very large in size, often amounting to millions, and occasionally billions, of words. The appeal of corpus methods, therefore, is that they allow us to analyse much larger and more representative amounts of data, using computer-aided methods that bring with them a degree of replicability and objectivity which can’t usually be achieved through purely manual analytical approaches.

What does a corpus linguistic analysis look like?
With the help of specialist computer programs (e.g. WordSmith Tools, AntConc), corpus linguists can quickly (and reliably) search for the most prominent linguistic patterns across their data. A useful technique for identifying salient patterns in a corpus is keywords. Simply put, keywords are words which occur significantly more often in one corpus compared with another. Keywords can therefore be considered to be characteristic of the corpus we are analysing (or more accurately, the genre or variety the corpus represents) and can flag up important themes in the data. As an example, the keywords below were generated from a 40 million-word corpus of patient feedback about the National Health Service (NHS) in England.[i] These keywords were generated by comparing this corpus against 1 million words of general British English.[ii]

Top 20 keywords from a corpus of patient feedback, ranked by LL[iii]

Although many of the keywords above (including the top 3) are grammatical words which don’t tell us much about the content of the patients’ comments, other keywords in this table are more revealing in terms of key themes in the data. For example, keywords like staff and dentist gesture towards the importance of staff members to the ways that patients provide feedback, while words like doctor, GP and doctors suggest a focus on doctors in particular. Other keywords reveal a focus on sites of care (surgery, practice), appointments (appointment), as well as more general concepts like care and service. Having identified key themes in the data, corpus linguistic techniques also allow us to then investigate more qualitatively how the patients actually talked about those themes in their comments.

Such a qualitative analysis typically involves exploring a particular keyword or set of keywords of interest by studying the words that tend to occur alongside it/them in the data. These words are known as collocates. By analysing a keyword in terms of its frequent collocates we can get a sense of how that word tends to be talked about in the texts in the corpus. To illustrate what a collocation analysis looks like, the table below shows the top 20 words which occur most frequently within the three words preceding and following the word appointment throughout the patients’ comments.

Top 20 collocates of appointment, ranked by LL

Scanning this list of collocates, we might note that over a third of the words are to do with the process of getting an appointment (get, book, make, getting, booked, booking, offered). Other themes we might note are a focus on emergency appointments (emergency, urgent), appointment booking systems (system), cancellations (cancelled) and waiting times (weeks). While the collocates therefore provide a flavour of the kinds of appointment-related topics that the patients discuss in their feedback, to understand what it is that they are actually saying about these topics, we need to dig a little deeper and read a selection of comments in their entirety. We can do this by reading and analysing concordance lines. Concordance lines display all the instances of a word or phrase in the corpus with a few words of surrounding text, thus allowing us to inspect any recurring patterns of use within the comments more widely. Continuing with our focus on the theme of appointments, the six randomly-selected concordance lines below are of the phrase emergency appointment.

Concordance lines of the phrase emergency appointment

From this admittedly small sample of concordance lines, we can observe some interesting trends in comments about emergency appointments. First, these comments tend to be negative (five out of six are negative, only #4 appears to be providing positive feedback). These negative comments point to a series of patient concerns about emergency appointments, which include waiting times (#1, #2, #5), being cross-examined by receptionists and other medical gatekeepers (#2), not qualifying for an emergency appointment (#3), a lack of appointment availability (#5) and being unable to book emergency appointments over the phone (#6). Therefore, this small selection of comments suggests that most comments about emergency appointments are negative, with appointment access a key area of patient concern.

What can corpus linguistics offer to healthcare research?
Communication, and language in particular, plays a significant role in reflecting and shaping the ways that people think about and experience health and healthcare in a range of clinical contexts. Early linguistic research into health communication relied heavily on relatively small data sets more suited to granular, qualitative analyses, such as samples of language taken from face-to-face clinical encounters or research interviews. A criticism often directed at such research was that the findings presented were based on limited datasets that were not necessarily representative of wider communication within the particular clinical context of interest. More recently, corpus linguistic methods have helped researchers to overcome some of these barriers, affording the possibility to learn about the linguistic character of health-related communication by studying large amounts of data representing communication across a wide spectrum of clinical contexts. Moreover, with the help of quantitative computational measures like keywords and collocation, linguists are able to ground their analyses in more statistically-robust evidence, thus enabling them to provide insights that come closer to meeting the standards for evidence-based research which are presently commonplace in the world of scientific medicine.

Although I have focussed here on the language of patient feedback, the established techniques introduced are adaptable and have been applied to the study of: patient-practitioner encounters, first-person illness accounts, media reporting of health and illness, and the language of e-health and online advice-seeking, to offer just a few examples. As the short analysis described here has hopefully demonstrated, the combination of quantitative corpus methods with a more qualitative, human-led perspective on language can powerfully elucidate significant patterns and commonalities in any communicative context, generating insights which can greatly enrich our understanding of the ways in which people communicate about health and illness. And this combination – of computational methods and human-led analysis – is crucial to such analyses. To end with a caveat: though the computer can flag up frequent and statistically interesting patterns in the data, it is up to the human user to explore and explain why they are significant.

Dr Gavin Brookes
LiPP Research Fellow/Business Consultant

[i] This data originates from the Beyond the Checkbox project in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University.

[ii] The corpus used to represent general British English is the BE06 (Baker, 2009).

[iii] Keyness was measured using the log-likelihood (LL) (Dunning, 1993) statistical confidence measure. The higher the LL score a keyword is assigned by the computer, the greater confidence the researcher can have that that keyword is statistically significant.

The post The finer details of the bigger picture: corpus linguistics in healthcare appeared first on Linguistics in the Workplace.

Whether it’s our scepticism of cold calls, exasperation with prolonged waiting times or general frustration with bureaucratic processes, we’ve all had our issues with call centres at one point or another. Whilst recent developments in technology have given us new and innovative platforms through which to engage with organisations, such as web chats and social media, interacting with a company’s employee over the phone remains the preferred mode of communication for many customers.

When service from call centres isn’t up to scratch, it can be both a nuisance to us as outsiders and extremely costly to the businesses themselves. In October 2016, for instance, part of Vodaphone’s £4.6million fine by Ofcom was for miscommunicating with customers over their rights with regard to unresolved complaints. More recently, in May 2017, Keurboom Communications were fined a record £400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office following complaints by more than 1,000 recipients of cold calls. What is less well-acknowledged about the call centre industry, however, is the scepticism, exasperations and frustrations that the people on the other end of the line, namely the call centre agents themselves (which as of January 2016 constituted 4% of the UK’s working population), experience on a daily basis.

Call centres represent a type of new-age factory in contemporary society, where traditional manual labour has been replaced by “language labour”. The absence of other important visual cues in communication from telephone encounters, such as facial expressions and body language, makes call centre agents’ use of language absolutely crucial. Therefore, it is unsurprising that call centres go to great lengths to control and monitor what their employees are permitted to say and how they say it, and, often just as importantly, what they are not allowed to say.

In extreme cases, every part of an agent’s input in a conversation can be scripted word-by-word. Whilst impractical – after all, what if a customer says something an agent cannot respond to? – this also subjects agents to a process of “de-individuation”. Void of linguistic licence and expression, the agent may have little option but to operate under the guise of a personality that has been constructed for them by the organisation, rather than their own. When this de-individuation is combined with the inevitably repetitive nature of call centre work itself, it is unsurprising this is an industry with notoriously high levels of staff stress and turnover. In my experience of working in and studying this workplace, it can be the very things that are intended to make employees’ jobs easier that can actually make them more difficult.

Research in applied linguistics is beginning to give an insight into precisely why the currently-adopted “one-size-fits-all” approach to language use in call centres is not guaranteed to work for both the agents who use it and the customers who are faced with it. The analysis of real call centre interactions by academics who specialise in studying the effectiveness of language use in conversation is starting to identify when and why miscommunication and frustrations may occur. This knowledge can be fed back to call centre managers and implemented in training programmes, for instance.

A number of studies have already pointed to the same conclusion: that because language is a creative resource, it may be a fruitless exercise to attempt to comprehensively anticipate and predetermine people’s behaviour in conversations. In reality, there is an increasing need for call centres to embrace the linguistic diversity of their workforce and so allow their employees the space and freedom to use language in a more natural and spontaneous way.

The collaboration of professionals from the call centre industry with academics in applied linguistics research, like those from LiPP at the University of Nottingham, promises to provide ways of developing call centre practices in order to help limit customer scepticism, exasperation and frustration, enhance the working lives and conditions of call centre workers and improve the overall operation of call centre businesses themselves.

Leigh Harrington
LiPP PhD Researcher

The post “How can I help?”: Using Applied Linguistics Research in Call Centres appeared first on Linguistics in the Workplace.

You do not have to look far to find useful statistics to demonstrate the prevalent use of social media, across our working and social lives. Smart Insights for example, tells us that as of January 2017 there were 2.8 billion active social media users, a 21% increase on the number of users from the previous year. Businesses are well aware of the potential of social media for customer engagement, with Facebook announcing having reached 4 million advertisers through its platform. Almost as pervasive as the stats supporting the use of social media for business are the ‘How to’ guides offering essential tips on making use of social media, reminding us that engaging and interacting with customers through social media is in itself, a skill.

At a very basic level, businesses can capitalise on the potential of social media for global distribution: of its advertising, products and services. Mobile technology supports eCommerce and social media is the shopfront, enabling business to cut down on rented retail units, stay open 24/7 and operate at an international level. This helps to support SMEs and even individuals looking to build their brand.

The defining characteristics though of social media – in contrast to other platforms supported by online communication – revolve around interactivity and the contributions of those who ‘use’ the resource. Here, the voice of customers is presented in the same space as the company directors and staff, which presents both challenges and opportunities for negotiating ‘brand identity’ and visibility. Customers have a more developed role, evolving from consumer, to contributor, distributor and in some cases creator. Potentially, businesses have a ready and willing (free) workforce that will promote its products through social media, presented through some artistic filter and thereby offering the customer the means to enhance their own identity through affiliation with the brand.

Furthermore, there are opportunities for market research that would otherwise be unattainable. The pinnacle of this perhaps is ‘My Starbucks Idea’, which operates as a standalone website alongside a Twitter page and invites customers to make suggestions about changes/additions to the menu that other customers can vote on in order to have it realised in store. Ultimately, business practices can be made more transparent through social media: be it in the development of the products or in customer services.

It is a common occurrence now to see customer complaints being dealt with publicly via social media. In these exchanges, companies can show not only that they are doing the ‘transactional work’ of business in terms of managing payments and delivering goods, but also a great deal of ‘identity’ work in presenting a business persona. Thus when Marty Lawrence targeted Sainsbury’s in a Tweet that reported that he was unable to buy fish at one of their stores because it didn’t have a ‘bar cod’, what followed was an extended back-and-forth of fish-related puns with ‘David’ on the Sainsbury’s Twitter account. Followers flocked to the Waterstone’s Twitter thread when David Willis was inadvertently locked in a store after hours in order to follow the updates that led to his eventual release. Through such exchanges, companies can present a more personable image, as well as capitalising on the immediacy of social media messages.

Businesses have approached social media with some caution though, with many companies producing policy documents for employees on how they ought to conduct themselves in online spaces. Coca-Cola for example, refers to its employees as ‘ambassadors’ for the company and encourages them to ‘disclose [their] affiliation’, but makes clear that in relation to topics that ‘require subject matter expertise’ (listing ingredients, obesity, the Company’s environmental impacts and the Company’s financial performance as examples) employees should ‘avoid the temptation to respond to these directly unless [they] respond with approved messaging the Company has prepared for these topics’. This highlights an issue many of us have on social media, where those in our social circle, our work lives and beyond come together in a shared space. In this environment, it would seem that you do not leave your work at the office.

Social media offers businesses a space to improve customer relationships (as well as business relationships) and gain contributions from its customers across various business practices. There is much to be gained from a customer base willing to engage with these practices (without formal employment – or payment!) and offer honest feedback; businesses that engage with these platforms and can navigate them well will surely come to know its own practices and its customers all the better.

Dr Luke Collins
LiPP Teaching Associate

The post #Follow4Follow: The Business of Social Media appeared first on Linguistics in the Workplace.

Writing emails can be a tricky business. Are you guilty of unwittingly pressing a ‘send’ button before realising that the message that you’ve just sent is ambiguous or might be taken the wrong way? On the other side of the spectrum, there’s spending precious hours of your working week re-reading and re-writing emails and agonising over their content.

The short, the long and the ugly

The short

We probably all had our fair share of monosyllabic or disyllabic replies. ‘Yes’, ‘ok’ and ‘sure’ most likely constitute a significant percentage of emails stored in any inbox. Admittedly, we’ve probably sent a considerable number of these ourselves.

Authors of these very economic messages waste no time or, as a matter of fact, valuable snippets of binary code to communicate what they have to say. They get to the point. Fast.

The long

There are the long-winded emails which consist of paragraphs and paragraphs of text. Composed with a surgical precision akin to that of most renowned writers of prose, long emails take… well, long to read and even longer to reply to. Composing one can, however, sometimes be a necessity.

The ugly

Finally, there are also the typo-ridden messages. Depending on the circumstances, you may or may not require skills excelling those of Alan Turning to decipher one of them. We’ve also been the culprits of sending these out. These smartphone keyboards are not easy to use after all!

Getting the balance right

Despite there being a few cases when specific features of different formats of email may be problematic, achieving balance between length and clarity is not difficult. It’s simply worth weighing up the following factors:

• How much you can rely on the level of knowledge shared by you and your addressee?
• The context of a particular interaction
• The conventions typically adopted in your workplace
• The formats of email typically used by your addressee
• The urgency of a particular workplace task

Typos may be unavoidable in many circumstances but it’s best to be extra vigilant, particularly when sending important messages.

Tone of email

Apart from features of different formats our emails take, one of the two key ingredients that play a crucial role in effective email communication is the adoption of the most appropriate interactional styles. While frequently it really is just a case of writing a brief message and hitting ‘send’, there are certain situations when you do want to take the extra time to compose a message carefully.

If that is the case, it is worth paying close attention to the interactional styles used in your email. These are, in general, grouped into two broad categories:

1. more collaborative and person-orientated style
2. more competitive/assertive and task-orientated style

These two can be easily blended together and used appropriately to suit the needs of a particular exchange.

As email communication lacks many features of face-to-face conversations (gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.), it is also more prone to miscommunication. In certain situations, badly composed emails may also damage our rapport with other colleagues.

In a bid to enable us to avoid this, IBM is currently in the process of developing a system that allows us to determine the tone of our emails. Using principles similar to those well established within the field of linguistics, Tone Analyser enables us to establish how much emphasis is placed on a particular type of interactional style. So, whether there is more focus on person- or task-orientated aspect of communication.

While still being in test stages, Tone Analyzer provides interesting insights into how our emails may be potentially interpreted by others. If you’d like to see how it works, give Tone Analyzer a test drive.

Dr Malgorzata Chalupnik
LiPP Research Fellow

The post What emails reveal about your interactional style appeared first on Linguistics in the Workplace.

Following the news that emoji might just be the fastest growing language in the UK and that elements of it might feature alongside the ‘like’ button on Facebook, using emoji is no longer sporadic or uncommon.

A new study conducted by Emogi reveals that more and more people of different ages are using it to communicate online. A staggering 92% of the respondents of the study admitted to using emoji and two thirds of people aged 35 and above use it on a regular basis. The Unicode Consortium – the company behind these increasingly popular pictograms – recently announced that they are now considering adding 67 new icons to the currently existing set.

From  to 

This form of communicating has come a long way since its humble beginnings in the 1980s when Scott Fahlman first used a smiley face to show that his comment posted on an internet forum was meant to be taken as a joke. The ability of emoji to express a wide range of emotions and also nuanced meanings is what makes it so appealing to use it online.

An example of a tweet which uses only emoticons – Andy Murray recaps his wedding day

We frequently describe face-to-face communication as being multi-modal, as it allows us to use various means to communicate what we want to express. Apart from words, profiling the tone of voice and body language such as gestures or facial expressions can tell us a lot about what others think or want to say. All of these elements are absent from written communication so using emoji is an ideal way of enriching our messages with that extra layer of meaning that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

As with any type of linguistic innovation, the rise of emoji also attracts criticism, but there is a considerable number of brands and organisations which have already incorporated it into their digital communications. Some of the more prominent adopters of emoji include Oreo, PETA and GE. On Twitter, many replies to customers or clients end with an emoticon, emoji or both (example below).

The question remains then to what degree will businesses adopt this method of communicating with others and whether they will come up with new and meaningful ways of using it to raise brand awareness and emotional engagement with their target audiences. All indications point to emojis playing an increasingly important role as business communication patterns transform on social media platforms.

Dr. Malgorzata Chalupnik
LiPP Research Fellow

The post Picture this: the rise of emojis. Will businesses follow? appeared first on Linguistics in the Workplace.