Expressing opinions and emotions while travelling on-line

Abstract New technologies are developed to facilitate our daily lives, and as a result, they also transform our reality and create new communication contexts between humans and machines. Mey (2006) insists on the two-way directivity of adaptation: humans need to adapt to the machine as well as machines need to adapt to humans. Our research investigates the relationship between technology, language, context and emotions, with special attention to the use of verbs and adjectives in personal descriptions of travel experiences. Specifically, two corpora of travel and tourism analyse how users share their experiences, and recommend or criticize certain itineraries and places, depending on their own likes and dislikes.