Identifying Cross-Cultural Differences in Word Usage

Aparna Garimella, Rada Mihalcea, James Pennebaker


Abstract
Personal writings have inspired researchers in the fields of linguistics and psychology to study the relationship between language and culture to better understand the psychology of people across different cultures. In this paper, we explore this relation by developing cross-cultural word models to identify words with cultural bias – i.e., words that are used in significantly different ways by speakers from different cultures. Focusing specifically on two cultures: United States and Australia, we identify a set of words with significant usage differences, and further investigate these words through feature analysis and topic modeling, shedding light on the attributes of language that contribute to these differences.
Anthology ID:
C16-1065
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
674–683
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1065
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aparna Garimella, Rada Mihalcea, and James Pennebaker. 2016. Identifying Cross-Cultural Differences in Word Usage. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 674–683, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Cross-Cultural Differences in Word Usage (Garimella et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/C16-1065.pdf