An Examination of Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences from Social Media Data with respect to Language Use

We present a methodology for analyzing cross-cultural similarities and differences using language as a medium, love as domain, social media as a data source and 'Terms' and 'Topics' as cultural features. We discuss the techniques necessary for the creation of the social data corpus from which emotion terms have been extracted using NLP techniques. Topics of love discussion were then extracted from the corpus by means of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Finally, on the basis of these features, a cross-cultural comparison was carried out. For the purpose of cross-cultural analysis, the experimental focus was on comparing data from a culture from the East (India) with a culture from the West (United States of America). Similarities and differences between these cultures have been analyzed with respect to the usage of emotions, their intensities and the topics used during love discussion in social media.