Mining Cross-Cultural Differences and Similarities in Social Media
Bill Yuchen Lin, Frank F. Xu, Kenny Qili Zhu, Seung-won Hwang · 2018
Cross-cultural differences and similarities are common in cross-lingual natural language understanding, especially for research in social media.For instance, people of distinct cultures often hold different opinions on a single named entity.Also, understanding slang terms across languages requires knowledge of cross-cultural similarities.In this paper, we study the problem of computing such cross-cultural differences and similarities.We present a lightweight yet effective approach, and evaluate it on two novel tasks: 1) mining cross-cultural differences of named entities and 2) finding similar terms for slang across languages.Experimental results show that our framework substantially outperforms a number of baseline methods on both tasks.The framework could be useful for machine translation applications and research in computational social science.