2013 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

The Language of Japanese Spam Mails

Research Project

Project/Area Number	25770162
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Research Institution	Waseda University
Principal Investigator	BACKHAUS Peter 早稲田大学, 教育・総合科学学術院, 准教授 (40582888)
Project Period (FY)	2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
Keywords	language / spam / sexuality / Japanese
Research Abstract	Preparation, data processing and basic analysis of the data went as planned. The number of messages for the corpus was reduced to 434 items. After grammatical tokenization, the total number of "words" in the corpus was 83,379, consisting of 5,771 word types. After a few basic quantitative aspects (message length, frequent vocabulary items and collocations, sender and title names, etc.) had been examined, I proceeded to a more detailed look at single messages with respect to the dealing with taboo expressions and the portrayal of female sexuality. It was already possible to publish a paper on this analysis in a peer-reviewed journal (cf. below).
Current Status of Research Progress	Current Status of Research Progress 2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned. Reason Everything went as planned
Strategy for Future Research Activity	This second phases of the project will be mainly dedicated to a more in-depth analysis of the data plus triangulation. Based on feedback I received when first presenting the data to a scientific audience in December last year (cf. below), I'm planning to add a separate empirical dimension by collecting recipients' evaluations on a given number of specific spam messages from the corpus. To be more specific, I'm intending to show these messages to between 50 and 100 undergraduate students and ask them to rate (1) the overall credibility of the contents of a message, (2) the naturalness of the language, and (3) the likeliness of a recipient's reaction. Of further interest will be if there are any recognizable differences in evaluations with regard to the gender of the participating students.
Expenditure Plans for the Next FY Research Funding	書籍の購入のため今後の研究に使用する