arXiv cs.CL· Hang Jiang, Nanxi Liu, Tiantian Wang, Cassandra Overney, Rukun Zhang, Artemisia Luk, Diyi Yang, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara·· 15 小时前AI 评分15
研究揭示美国中餐馆中英文店名的系统性差异
Lost in Translation: Investigating Systematic Discrepancies between Parallel English and Chinese Names of American Chinese Restaurants
AI 导读
一项针对全美 3,172 家中餐馆（占 Google Maps 总量的 10%）的研究发现，英文店名更常强调位置与特色，中文店名更常强调积极寓意与氛围。研究构建了 8 维名称框架和包含 884 对标注中英文店名的 NameFrames 数据集，并搭建 NLP 流程用框架与嵌入向量距离度量语义差异。位于城区、华裔人口更集中县或较新的餐馆，中英文店名差异明显更大。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Given that the Chinese are one of the oldest ethnic groups to immigrate to the US, their cuisine have become central to the US dining scene and an interesting avenue to study how Chinese immigrants have culturally adapted into American life. In that regard, previous research has focused on analyzing the English names that Chinese restaurants adopt, e.g., finding the use of familiar and typical words. To investigate how Chinese immigrants have culturally integrated in the US depending on social, geographic and demographic contexts, we investigate in this work the under-explored relationship between the Chinese and English names of American Chinese restaurants. Specifically, we conduct a study on 3,172 Chinese restaurants (10% of the total on Google Maps) sampled across the US. We present 8-dimension name frames to capture the underlying meanings behind names and create the NameFrames dataset containing 884 annotated parallel Chinese/English names. We also built an NLP pipeline to analyze the semantic discrepancies between names with both frame-based and embedding-based distance metrics. Our frame analysis shows that English names more often emphasize Location and Specialty, while Chinese names more often emphasize Positivity and Ambiance. Furthermore, we observe that for Chinese restaurants located in urban areas, those in counties with a higher concentration of Chinese population, or those that are relatively new, the discrepancies between the English and Chinese names are noticeably larger. Finally, interviews with 10 Chinese restaurant owners reveal additional interesting insights regarding naming conventions.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.35191 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.35191v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.35191 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Tiantian Wang [view email]
[v1]
Mon, 26 Oct 2026 10:45:40 UTC (2,744 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CL · arxiv.org