INSPIRE Track 1: Language-Based Computational Methods for Analyzing Worldviews

该INSPIRE奖的部分资金来自计算机和信息科学与工程局的网络-人类系统计划，计算机和信息科学与工程局的健壮智能计划，以及社会、行为和经济科学局的社会心理学计划。这个项目的目标是通过心理学和计算语言学领域的创新方法和工具，收集人们在不同文化内部和跨文化组织和理解他们世界的方式的新见解。这个项目的发现将使人们更好地了解个人心理层面以及文化本身，同时开发和展示新的研究技术，这些技术可以在未来被许多学科使用，以利用目前在线可用的大量具有科学价值的文本数据。具体而言，该项目针对以下三个主要研究目标：1)建立一个非常大的跨文化英语文化写作数据库，涵盖多种文体和体裁，包括：社交媒体(如博客、推特)；新闻文章；文学作品；学生作品。2)构建能够自动识别不同文化中概念使用差异的计算语言模型，并大规模应用这些模型。3)在实验室研究中，通过心理学定性和定量的方法验证这些计算模型的结果。人们使用文字的方式可以提供对他们看待和理解他们世界的方式的洞察。日常语言还可以告诉我们人们的社会、情感和心理状态，甚至他们对自己和他人的看法。特别有趣的是，我们发现的许多关于个人语言的社会和心理洞察可以外推到群体、社区和整个文化。这个项目旨在分析不同文化背景下人们的书面语言，使我们能够更好地理解不同人群理解他们所处世界的方式。简而言之，它将利用计算语言学和社会心理学的进步，通过分析人们使用词语的方式来跟踪非常大的群体的潜在价值观、信念和关切。与以前的研究不同，以前的研究局限于相对较小的针对不同文化的少数概念的自我报告调查，这个项目将帮助我们了解代表数十万人的几种文化对数千个概念的认知差异。这个项目承诺通过分析人们通过日常语言使用来理解他们世界的方式，来揭示文化差异。该方法将为通信、威胁控制、文化价值观跟踪等方面的应用提供信息。该项目还将以计算机科学和心理学培训的形式为学生提供教育机会，他们将直接接触跨学科研究、文化多样性和国际经验。最后，将作为该项目的一部分创建的大型多文化数据集以及处理这些数据集的工具将公之于众，从而使今后的研究以及与分析和理解文化多样性和世界观有关的教育项目成为可能。

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Cyber-Human Systems Program in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Robust Intelligence Program in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and the Social Psychology Program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. The goal of this project is to gather new insights into the ways people organize and understand their worlds within and across different cultures by means of innovative methodologies and tools from the fields of psychology and computational linguistics. The findings from this project will provide a better understanding of people on the individual psychological level as well as the cultures themselves, while developing and demonstrating new research techniques that can be used in future by many disciplines to exploit the vast troves of scientifically valuable textual data currently available online. Specifically, the project targets the following three main research objectives: 1) Construct a very large multicultural database of writings from English-speaking cultures, covering several styles and genres, including: social media (e.g., blogs, tweets); news articles; literary works; student writings. 2) Build computational linguistic models that can automatically identify differences in concept usage for different cultures, and apply these models on a large scale. 3) Validate the findings of these computational models through psychological qualitative and quantitative methods in laboratory studies. The ways people use words can provide insights into the ways they see and understand their worlds. Everyday language can also tell us about people's social, emotional, and psychological states and even the ways they think about themselves and others. Particularly interesting is that many of the social and psychological insights we find with the language of individuals can be extrapolated to groups, communities, and entire cultures. This project seeks to analyze the written language of people across several cultures in a way that will allow us to better understand the ways groups of people understand their worlds. In short, it will use advances in computational linguistics and social psychology to track the underlying values, beliefs, and concerns of very large groups of people by analyzing the ways they use words. Unlike previous studies, which have been limited to relatively small self-report surveys targeting a handful of concepts across cultures, this project will help us understand the differences in perception for thousands of concepts, by several cultures representing hundreds of thousands of people.This project promises to shed new light on cultural differences by analyzing the ways people understand their worlds through their everyday language use. The approach will inform applications in communication, threat control, tracking of cultural values, and others. The project will also provide educational opportunities, in the form of training for students in both computer science and psychology, who will be directly exposed to interdisciplinary research, cultural diversity, and international experiences. Finally, the large multicultural dataset that will be created as part of this project, along with the tools to process it, will be made publicly available, thus enabling future research, as well as educational projects concerned with the analysis and understanding of cultural diversity and worldview.