Social Roles in Different Cultures

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a data set of social roles and their aspects (descriptors or actions) as emerging from surveys conducted across a sample of over 400 respondents from two different cultures: US and India. The responses show that there are indeed differences of role perceptions across the cultures, with actions showcasing less variability, and descriptors exhibiting stronger differences. In addition, we notice strong shifts in sentiment and emotions across the cultures. We further present a pilot study in predicting social roles based on attributes by leveraging dependency-based corpus statistics and embedding models.Our evaluations show that models trained on the same culture as the test set are better predictors of social role ranking.