COFRE – Corpus of Online Forum Replies. A Trilingual TripAdvisor Corpus for the Study of Address Forms and Beyond

This paper presents the Corpus of Online Forum Replies (COFRE), a multilingual corpus collected from TripAdvisor forums in four European countries: Belgium, France, Spain, and Portugal. The corpus contains 4,084 discussion threads and 32,147 replies, covering an eleven-year period (2015-2025). The corpus provides the basis for the empirical study of address forms in comparable contexts in computer-mediated communication.The main objectives of this paper are (i) to describe the design, compilation, and annotation of the corpus, (ii) to quantify the use of address forms in these interactions, and (iii) to provide a contrastive analysis of address practices in the concerned languages. The corpus was manually collected in HTML format (2025-2026), including information about the messages such as titles, textual content, replies, and dates. User information was also included when available, and was automatically pseudonymised. Address forms were annotated with spaCy (Python) at the pronoun and verb level. Preliminary results reveal substantial cross-country differences in the use of these forms, particularly between Spain (where the informal T-form is used in nearly all cases) and the other countries (where the V-form is preferred). Beyond the study of address forms, COFRE provides a valuable resource for research on digital discourse, linguistics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics.

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Sampedro Mella, M., Cougnon, L.-A., & De Cock, B. (2026). COFRE – Corpus of Online Forum Replies. A Trilingual TripAdvisor Corpus for the Study of Address Forms and Beyond. VARIACIÓN. Revista de variación y cambio lingüistico, 3, 132-156. https://doi.org/10.30827/3020.9854rvcl.3.2026.37188 (Original work published 2026)