Multilingual Harvesting of Cross-Cultural Stereotypes

Abstract

People rarely articulate explicitly what a na-tive speaker of a language is already assumed to know. So to acquire the stereotypical knowledge that underpins much of what is said in a given culture, one must look to what is implied by language rather than what is overtly stated. Similes are a convenient ve-hicle for this kind of knowledge, insofar as they mark out the most salient aspects of the most frequently evoked concepts. In this pa-per we perform a multilingual exploration of the space of common-place similes, by min-ing a large body of Chinese similes from the web and comparing these to the English sim-iles harvested by Veale and Hao (2007). We demonstrate that while the simile-frame is in-herently leaky in both languages, a multilin-gual analysis allows us to filter much of the noise that otherwise hinders the knowledge extraction process. In doing so, we can also identify a core set of stereotypical descrip-tions that exist in both languages and accu-rately map these descriptions onto a multilin-gual lexical ontology like HowNet. Finally, we demonstrate that conceptual descriptions that are derived from common-place similes are extremely compact and predictive of onto-logical structure. 1