Life values in Russia and China: Semantic analysis and comparison

Abstract

The paper seeks to explore the core life values of people living in Russia and China using an online survey in the respondents’ native languages with samples of 887 and 559 participants from each country respectively, who were asked to think of three words associated ‘with something most important in life’. The word-association arrays were translated into English by an automatic translator; then we compared the frequencies of individual words or those of their meanings obtained using the Roget’s Thesaurus. The words ‘family’ and ‘love’ were the most frequent in both samples, but the frequencies of these and most of the other words from the semantic core of each sample differed significantly. Analyses at the level of semantic vectors showed that more than half of the meanings that Russian respondents described as important and more than a third of the meanings important to the Chinese respondents had significant differences in frequencies between the samples. The paper presents 62 semantic groups of the Roget’s Thesaurus, the frequencies of which are reliably different; these are the meanings in which the Chinese and Russian samples differ with regard to life values. There are also 26 semantic groups, the frequencies of which are statistically the same and comparatively high in both samples: these are the common meanings. The results may be used in the design of automatic and AI systems to reduce the intercultural barriers.