Classification of Cross-cultural News Events

Abstract: We present a methodology to support the analysis of culture from text such as news events and demonstrate its usefulness on categorizing news events from different categories (society, business, health, recreation, science, shopping, sports, arts, computers, games and home) across different geographical locations (different places in 117 countries). We group countries based on the culture that they follow and then filter the news events based on their content category. The news events are automatically labelled with the help of Hofstedes cultural dimensions. We present combinations of events across different categories and check the performances of different classification methods. We also presents experimental comparison of different number of features in order to find a suitable set to represent the culture.