Open AccessExploring cultural differences in language usage: The case of negation
Author(s) -
Stoytcheva Svetlozara,
Cohen Dov,
Blake Catherine
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.2014.14505101086
Subject(s) - negation , newspaper , linguistics , contrast (vision) , natural (archaeology) , computer science , natural language processing , psychology , artificial intelligence , history , sociology , media studies , philosophy , archaeology
Prior research suggests that speakers of Asian languages are more likely to use negation than English speakers. Our goal in this work is to explore this theory using empirical data from news stories. Specifically, we used natural language processing to compare negation usage in two newspapers: the New York Times and Xinhua News (English Edition). Overall, negation represents 0.55% of typed dependencies in the New York Times (versus 0.18% in Xinhua News ). Additionally, 9.28% of sentences and 86.56% of articles in the New York Times contain one or more instances of negation (compared to 3.33% of sentences and 24.94% of articles in Xinhua News ). In contrast to the prevalent theory, negation is approximately three times more common in the New York Times than in Xinhua News (English Edition).