ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an application of the USAS to investigate user comments sections also known as ‘below the line’ comments discussing public health. Through a corpus analysis of groups of words of similar semantic meaning, this study captures the key themes of extended online discussions to consider the dialogue between journalists and the public in understanding complex global issuesl like antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The USAS is an automatic tagger that provides a form of semantic annotation and allows to process large datasets to identify key topics and some aspects of authorial style. It has been applied to evaluate user comments with respect to news articles and facilitated a comparison between the article and comments thread, as well as between the material from different publications. The chapter also facilitates a comparison of multiple datasets, for example across different publications or over time, that goes beyond what is feasible for manual types of analysis.
