The difference in culture between the U.S. and Japan is a popular subject for Western vs. Eastern cultural comparison for researchers. One particular challenge is to obtain and annotate multilingual datasets. In this study, we utilized COVID-19 tweets from the two countries as a case study, focusing particularly on discussions concerning masks. The annotation task was designed to gain insights into societal attitudes toward the mask policies implemented in both countries. The aim of this study is to provide a practical approach for the annotation task by thoroughly documenting how we aligned the multilingual annotation guidelines to obtain a comparable dataset. We proceeded to document the effective practices during our annotation process to synchronize our multilingual guidelines. Furthermore, we discussed difficulties caused by differences in expression style and culture, and potential strategies that helped improve our agreement scores and reduce discrepancies between the annotation results in both languages. These findings offer an alternative method for synchronizing multilingual annotation guidelines and achieving feasible agreement scores for cross-cultural annotation tasks. This study resulted in a multilingual guideline in English and Japanese to annotate topics related to public discourses about COVID-19 masks in the U.S. and Japan.

Public opinion in social media is increasingly becoming a critical factor in pandemic control. Understanding the emotions of a population towards vaccinations and COVID-19 may be valuable in convincing members to become vaccinated. We investigated the emotions of Japanese Twitter users towards Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccination. Using the WRIME dataset, which provides emotion ratings for Japanese Tweets sourced from writers (Tweet posters) and readers, we fine-tuned a BERT model to predict levels of emotional intensity. This model achieved a training accuracy of MSE = 0.356. A separate dataset of 20,254 Japanese Tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords was also collected, on which the fine-tuned BERT was used to perform emotion analysis. Afterwards, a correlation analysis between the extracted emotions and a set of vaccination measures in Japan was conducted.The results revealed that surprise and fear were the most intense emotions predicted by the model for writers and readers, respectively, on the vaccine-related Tweet dataset. The correlation analysis also showed that vaccinations were weakly positively correlated with predicted levels of writer joy, writer/reader anticipation, and writer/reader trust.