Analyzing Folktales of Different Regions Using Topic Modeling and Clustering

TL;DR

This study uses topic modeling and clustering to analyze folktales from various regions, revealing cultural similarities and differences, and demonstrating the effectiveness of NLP techniques in cultural document analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of topic modeling and clustering to compare folktales across regions, uncovering cultural patterns and regional differences.

Findings

Common themes include family, food, gender roles, mythological figures, and animals.

Regional differences in folktale topics relate to local environment and animals.

European and Asian folktales often share similarities.

Abstract

This paper employs two major natural language processing techniques, topic modeling and clustering, to find patterns in folktales and reveal cultural relationships between regions. In particular, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation and BERTopic to extract the recurring elements as well as K-means clustering to group folktales. Our paper tries to answer the question what are the similarities and differences between folktales, and what do they say about culture. Here we show that the common trends between folktales are family, food, traditional gender roles, mythological figures, and animals. Also, folktales topics differ based on geographical location with folktales found in different regions having different animals and environment. We were not surprised to find that religious figures and animals are some of the common topics in all cultures. However, we were surprised that European and Asian folktales were often paired together. Our results demonstrate the prevalence of certain elements in cultures across the world. We anticipate our work to be a resource to future research of folktales and an example of using natural language processing to analyze documents in specific domains. Furthermore, since we only analyzed the documents based on their topics, more work could be done in analyzing the structure, sentiment, and the characters of these folktales.