An investigation of cross-cultural social tagging behaviours between Chinese and Americans
| Published date | 05 February 2018 |
| Pages | 103-118 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-08-2016-0173 |
| Date | 05 February 2018 |
| Author | Qian Hu,Xin Lin,Shuguang Han,Lei Li |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
An investigation of cross-cultural
social tagging behaviours between
Chinese and Americans
Qian Hu
Department of Information Management, Central China Normal University,
Wuhan, China
Xin Lin
School of Information Management, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
Shuguang Han
School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, USA, and
Lei Li
Department of Information Management,
Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to explore different tagging behaviours between Chinese and
Americans by analysing the movie tags, and explore the feasibility of applying cultural differences to tag
recommendations.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper introducedhypotheses based on several well-established
psychological theories and tested them with social tags for the same movies generated by Chinese and
Americans. And to prove the utilityof the cultural factor consideration, this paper conducted a cross-cultural
tag recommendationexperiment.
Findings –The results show that compared with Americans, Chinese users tend toadd more tags about
movies’backgroundinformation (e.g. release year) and global contextualcharacteristics (e.g. genre); they also
prefer to add tags about production countries and factual tags, and cultural factors can be applied for
recommendingmore accurate tags.
Research limitations/implications –Other reasons for tagging differences beyond cultural factors
have not be explored.Tags for some sample movies in MovieLensmight be unstable, as they had been tagged
by a small scaleof users; as a result, the tags’type distribution might be influenced.
Practical implications –The results and conclusionof this study will be beneficial for the cross-cultural
applicationsof social tags and mining users’interests basedon tags.
Originality/value –This paper provided a deeper investigation of the cross-cultural effect in people’s
social tagging behaviours from cognitive perspective, and an empirical analysis has been performed to
exploreproper approaches of incorporating culturaldifferences for tag recommendation.
Keywords Cross-cultural differences, Culture-specific tag recommendations,
Social tagging behaviours
Paper type Research paper
This research was financially supported by the Normally Project of National Social Science
Foundation of China: “Research of Industry Information Service Integration Oriented to the Internet
plus Industry Chain”(Grant No. 16BTQ063) and the Key Project of the National Social Science
Foundation of China: “Research on Knowledge Discovery of Internet Resource base on Multi-
Dimensional Aggregation”(Grant No. 13&ZD183).
Cross-cultural
social tagging
103
Received26 August 2016
Revised8 May 2017
Accepted18 May 2017
TheElectronic Library
Vol.36 No. 1, 2018
pp. 103-118
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-08-2016-0173
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
Introduction
In recent years, social tagging systems have becoming important resources for
information classification, as well as social tagging behaviours, such as searching and
recommendations (Gupta et al., 2011). Existing social tagging studies mostly focussed on
the tagging motivations, use patterns and social tag recommendations (Gemmell et al.,
2009;Golder and Huberman, 2005;Sen et al., 2006), while most of them ignored cultural
effects. Through extensive comparative analyses, existing studies (Chen and Tsoi, 2011;
Dong et al., 2012;Peesapati et al., 2010) found that users from different countries perform
different types of social tagging behaviours. Understanding of cross-cultural social
tagging behaviour may be helpful for using the social tags from one culture/language to
solve the data sparsity of social tags of the same item in another culture/language (Eleta
and Golbeck, 2012;Gupta et al., 2011). The present study’s authors argue that cultural
difference plays a major role. Consistent with this hypothesis, the study aims to gain a
comprehensive understanding of the cultural differences in social tagging between
Chinese (individuals who grew up in the Chinese culture) and Americans (individuals
who grew up in the American culture), and further explore the feasibility of applying
cultural differences to tag recommendations. This study extends prior research via three
aspects. First, having observed the lack of proper examination of cultural difference in
the context of social tagging applications, it is treated as an important topic in the present
research. Although Chen and Tsoi (2011) have examined social tagging behaviour
differences, the system interface varies significantly with the state-of-the-art social
tagging systems (Dong et al., 2012). Other studies (Dong et al., 2012;Dong and Fu, 2010;
Peesapati et al., 2010) were performed in a controlled lab setting, which may affect a
user’s normal tagging behaviour (Denscombe, 2011). Second, a deeper investigation of the
cross-cultural effect in people’s social tagging behaviour is planned. A deeper
understanding of cultural differences at the cognitive level should be emphasized because
several existing studies have shown that social tagging is accompanied by the cognitive
process (Pak et al., 2007;Sinha, 2005). Third, the utility of applying cultural differences in
social tagging systems has not been examined and drives the present study to perform an
extensive empirical analysis to explore proper approaches of incorporating cultural
differences for tag recommendation.
To be specific, answers to the followingresearch questions are sought:
RQ1. In what ways do cross-cultural cognitive processes differ between Chinese and
Americans, and how does it influencetheir social tagging behaviours?
RQ2. Can cultural factorsbe integrated into social tag recommendationsystems?
The paper is organized in the following way. A brief overview of related work is presented.
Then the hypotheses, based on several well-established psychological theories related to
cross-cultural behaviours,are introduced. Next, the data and methods used in this study are
explained. Then the results of the hypotheses testing are presented. An experiment is
conducted to test whether incorporating cross-cultural differences in user’s social tagging
behaviour affectstag recommendation performance. Finally, thesummary and discussion of
the findings of this studyare presented.
Literature review
As this study focuses on the social tagging behaviour of Chinese and American users, the
related research is reviewed for a betterpositioning of the present study. Then, the relevant
work is surveyed on the cross-cultural differences between Chinese and Americans, which
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