Capturing Cultural Differences in Expressions of Intentions

The intersection of psychology and computational linguistics is capable of providing novel automated insight into the language of everyday cognition through analysis of micro-blogs. While Twitter is often seen as banal or focused only on the who, what, when or where tweets can actually serve as a source for learning about the language people use to express complex cogntive states and their cultural identity. In this contribution we introduce a novel model which captures latent cultural dimensions through an individual’s expressions of intentionality. We then show how these latent cultures can be used to create a culturally-sensitive model which provides enahnced detection of signals of intentionality in tweets. Finally, we demonstrate how these models reveal interesting cross-cultural differences in the goals and motivations of individuals from different cultures.