Various efforts in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community have been made to accommodate linguistic diversity and serve speakers of many different languages. However, it is important to acknowledge that speakers and the content they produce and require, vary not just by language, but also by culture. Although language and culture are tightly linked, there are important differences. Analogous to cross-lingual and multilingual NLP, cross-cultural and multicultural NLP considers these differences in order to better serve users of NLP systems. We propose a principled framework to frame these efforts, and survey existing and potential strategies.

We propose Word Embedding Networks, a novel method that is able to learn word embeddings of individual data slices while simultaneously aligning and ordering them without feeding temporal information a priori to the model. This gives us the opportunity to analyse the dynamics in word embeddings on a large scale in a purely data-driven manner. In experiments on two different newspaper corpora, the New York Times (English) and die Zeit (German), we were able to show that time actually determines the dynamics of semantic change. However, there is by no means a uniform evolution, but instead times of faster and times of slower change.