Disentangling Topic Models: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Personal Values through Words

We present a methodology based on topic modeling that can be used to identify and quantify sociolinguistic differences between groups of people, and describe a regression method that can disentangle the influences of different attributes of the people in the group (e.g., culture, gender, age). As an example, we explore the concept of personal values, and present a cross-cultural analysis of valuebehavior relationships spanning writers from the United States and India.