PONE-D-23-02829Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discoursePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Fernandez-Cruz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

If you choose to revise the manuscript, please pay close attention to reviewers remarks (provided in a separate file). The review provides very clear insights into what should be revised in the manuscript. The main aspects are as follows:

<ul> <li>

The corpus is not adequately described. In fact the reference [Fernández-Cruz et al., 2020] is mentioned only in the cover letter, but not in the manuscript and not in the bibliography section.

This aspect must be revised.

<li>

Regarding the statistical analysis and methods: some aspects are described, but other aspects and some analyses are not properly described, especially for a wide audience (e.g. UFA, Gwet's A1)

Also, it is not even clear what was measured . For example, line 300 says “we compare the yearly sentiment means.” What are they the means of? Per document? Per section? This only illustrates the need to provide a detailed account of what you measured and how you measured it (and not just mentioning the tool). Another example: table 1 - what is the relative frequency of? Of the term 'inflation' ? TSS and TSI AVG values – computed over what – documents? paragraphs? sentences? words?

It would be also advisable to explain your terminology for a wider audience. For example (line 324) “reduces the subcorpus size bias” - what is it and why such reduction is important in the context of this research.

Note that these are just examples, please make an effort to clarify and adequately explain all aspects in your Materials and Methods section.

<li>

The theoretical claims in the introduction and in the conclusion do not closely follow the actual measures and analyses as presented. Please refer to the detailed review for specific suggestions.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 13 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

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Michael Flor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: An interesting and well-written study with innovative methodology; however, I suggest some revisions are still necessary for maximum benefit of readers unfamiliar with the study and its underlying arguments.

Please see separate attached document for my suggestions

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Reviewer #1: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: notes_review_inflation - Copy.docx

PONE-D-23-02829R1Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discoursePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Fernandez-Cruz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 07 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Michael Flor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

The manuscript (R1) requires just some minor revisions.

Pleas pay close attention to the reviewer comments, specifically in the file named re_review - Copy.docx

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I just have some final suggestions for editing the manuscript before it is finalised and published. See separate file for these

**********

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Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: re_review - Copy.docx

PONE-D-23-02829R2Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discoursePLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Fernandez-Cruz,

Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Version R2 has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points outlined below.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 17 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

I am aware that you have requested expedited processing   

Kind regards,

Michael Flor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

I have closely read the manuscript and I think revision R2 mostly addresses the reviewer recommendations made after revision R1.

There are still issues than need to be resolved, mostly technical, but not only.

Here is a list of points that need to be addressed:

1.

Line 99: "In contrast to the Federal Reserve" -- add "in the USA"

2.

Line 109: "that raised the existence" - what does 'raised' mean here? probably a different word is needed

3.

Line 155: "Waldron [11" -- should be "Waldron [18]"

4.

Line 161: "We adhere to Lyons’ [12," -- the reference should be "[20,"

5.

Line 167: "[l]anguages.." -- make it "languages..."

6.

Line 199: "Louw [19, p. 157] defined semantic..." -- Louw reference is [26]

7.

Lines 208-219: except for a short survey of detractors, what is the purpose/message of this paragraph? It is unclear. In the review of R1, a reviewer has also mentioned about this "Basically, the point isn’t to include the references just for the sake of having mentioned them, but to engage with the underlying issue regarding how the authors conceptualise/approach this in their own work."

The current paragraph in R2 is just mentioning detractors of semantic prosody.

The statement on lines 217-219: "The paper emphasizes the need to differentiate between collocational patterning and the connotations associated with a lexical item"

is not clear. Where is this differentiation reflected?

Maybe omit this whole paragraph.

8.

Line 221-222: "and progressively over time collocates more and more frequently" -- the sentence seems broken around the word 'collocates'. Rewrite this sentence.

9.

Line 240: "topics, and their attributes” [22, p. 259]." -- reference number [22] is not correct. Maybe 36?

10.

Lines 250-251: "(specifically, Transformers-based models, such as BERT) offer current state-of-the-art results for SA tasks [38]" --

Reference 38 is about machine translation. For sentiment, try a different paper,

maybe https://aclanthology.org/N19-1035/

11.

Line 260: "The traditional criticism to machine learning approaches (e.g., [30])" -- wrong reference [30].

12.

Note: Publication [41] (Taboada) is in the bibliographic list, but is not referenced in the manuscript text.

Consider mentioning it in section 2.3

13.

Line 303: "is a sudden rise in relative their frequency" --> "their relative frequency"

14.

Lines 329-330: "We opted for the LogDice statistical measure (14-LogDice(7), L5-R5,C5,NC35),"

a) Please provide a reference to the LogDice original paper

Rychly, P. (2008). A lexicographer-friendly association score. In P. Sojka & A. Horak

(Eds.), Proceedings of recent advances in Slavonic natural language processing,

RASLAN (pp. 6–9). Brno: Masaryk University.

b) Please explain "L5-R5,C5,NC35" - those are not self-evident.

15.

lines 326-327: "For our research purposes, individual variation (e.g., authors, newspapers) was relevant."

It is not clear how relevant it was, i.e. where is it reflected in the results?

Maybe omit this sentence.

16.

Lines 373-380 (evaluation study):

Manual annotations are into 3 classes (positive, negative, neutral),

but TSS is on the scale 0-100.

Please describe how do you convert TSS values into (positive, negative, neutral)

(using cutoffs ?), so as to get 3-class results that are presented in Table 1.

17.

Lines 383-385: "Sketch Engine [56], a web-based tool that extracts linguistic information, (in our case,

relative frequencies per million tokens, collocations and concordances) from large corpora."

It is not quite clear how you used the Sketch Engine. Did you upload the GRNC to the SketchEngine?

Did you calculate frequencies over whole GRNC, or just the 'inflation' subset, or in other corpora? State it explicitly.

18.

Section 3.4 "Method".

This section lists four "steps" of analysis (those are separate analyses),

but it does not provide the results.

The results are listed in section 4.

This arrangement makes it difficult for the reader to follow the logic/description of analyses and their results (due to separation in the manuscript).

Please consider rearranging the text so that each description of analysis is followed by its results,

and then switch to the next set of analyses.

19.

Line 413: "analyzed using the peaks-and-troughs [59] technique"

Reference 59 is Gabrielatos&Marchi2012, but that presentation is about keyness, it is not about the peaks-and-troughs method

( peaks-and-troughs are not even mentioned in those slides).

Please cite a proper source.

20.

Figures 4 and 5: the figures are presented with clipped range on the Y axes.

Please consider adding a version the Fig.4 chart with the full range of the Y-axis, so readers can

get a fuller impression of the fluctuations relative to the full 0-100 range of the scale.

The values on Fig.4 seem to be in the narrow range 40-51, which is very close to the general 'neutral' line of 50.

Or maybe mark on the chart which zones of the Y-axis are negative/neutral/positive

(maybe use the cutoff values from the evaluation study?)

21.

Lines 444-463:

"In Fig 4, we identify the first stage in 2007, which corresponds to the stage prior

to the outbreak of the crisis, and a second stage of six years that starts with a pronounced

decline in negative sentiment values in 2008 and remains slightly upward until 2013."

This description does not seem to be corresponding to what I see in Figure 4.

For 2007 the line goes steeply down, which indicates growing negative sentiment.

The growth of negative sentiment slows in 2008. You use the word 'decline'

This is not adequate for two reasons. First, it is incongruent with the graphical depiction - in the chart going-down (or declining) means become more negative,

whereas you mean that negativity trend lessens (so decline in negativity is line-going-up-in-the-chart).

Negativity seems to be stable in 2009 and the change to positive seems to begin in 2010.

For the whole section of lines 444-463, the range of obtained TSS values is very close to 50.

Is 40, and 46-47, really negative or is it still within the lower bounds of 'neutral'?

is 51.21 really positive? or just firmly within neutral zone? The claim that 51.21 is 'positive' seems dubious.

Please state what are the negative/neutral/positive zones for the 0-100 TSS scale.

22.

Figure 6.

Please explain what do the colors red/green/grey mean in figure 6.

The manuscript text seems to disregard the coloring.

What did you try to convey there?

23.

Lines 485-486: "The term ‘inflation’ in the 2007 sub-corpus occurs in contexts with mainly positive connotations".

How this claim can be reconciled with Fig.4 which shows rapid growth towards more negative sentiment in 2007?

So the overall sentiment was declining (becoming negative) but somehow 'inflation' managed to sit in positive contexts?

This is very strange.

The TSS was computed only over 'inflation' sentences from GRNC, right?

24.

a)

Lines 563-564: "In the third study segment (2013-2015), ‘inflation’ co-occurrs with more positive sentiment words. Specifically, directionality indicators (‘low’, and ‘fall’,..."

Problem here is that neither 'low' nor 'fall' are positive sentiment words.

'Fall' (in the sense of falling) might even have some generic negative connotation.

So how do you derive that statement?

b)

Lines 567-568: "A cursory glance at the 2013-2015 concordance lines clearly indicates positive results".

Please don't send readers to concordance lines (even if the data is made available). It is also very subjective and vague.

You must support your claims in the body of the manuscript! Use statistics when needed.

25.

Line 588: "In 2015 TSS scores fall to the threshold of negativity."

What is that threshold? Is it strictly "50"? Where is the 'neutral' zone?

26.

Line 595. Please explain what are "HICP figures".

27.

Almost all the description is section 4 is focused on TSS.

The TSI results are mentioned but mostly ignored.

This creates a startling imbalance.

Please consider saying something about the TSI results.

or maybe remove TSI from this manuscript, consider it for another publication?

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discourse

PONE-D-23-02829R3

Dear Dr. Fernandez-Cruz,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Michael Flor

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE