A World of Difference: Divergent Word Interpretations among People

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to quantify and analyze differences in word interpretations among various groups, revealing insights into social, gender, and regional distinctions through semantic divergence analysis.

Contribution

It presents a new approach for measuring semantic differences in word interpretations across groups, validated by quantitative evaluations and applied to gender and regional distinctions.

Findings

Divergences in word interpretations exist among different groups.

Group-specific interpretations reflect social, gender, and regional features.

The approach effectively reveals meaningful group differences.

Abstract

Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among different groups of people. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by quantitative evaluations. Experiment results indicate that divergences in word interpretations exist. We further apply the approach to two well studied types of differences between people -- gender and region. The detected words with divergent interpretations reveal the unique features of specific groups of people. For gender, we discover that certain different interests, social attitudes, and characters between males and females are reflected in their divergent interpretations of many words. For region, we find that specific interpretations of certain words reveal the geographical and cultural features of different regions.