Understanding Philosophies of Higher Education between Countries in China's Belt and Road Initiative

Analysis of University Mottos Based on Natural Language Processing Technology

Bibliographic Data

ID4182647
AuthorsHengli Wang (0000-0003-2786-0185, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law), Qiuyun Lu (0000-0002-6461-4779, Yangtze University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume12
Issue4
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSAGE Open (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2158-2440 • E-ISSN: 2158-2440
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/21582440221141867
OpenAlexW4312938633
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited40

University mottos have been demonstrated to convey educational philosophies, but few studies have investigated the educational philosophies reflected by university mottos from countries along the "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) route, with applying the analytical approaches like text mining and natural language processing (NLP). This present investigation constructed a database of university mottos from 1,535 universities in 61 countries along the OBOR route and applied NLP technology to explore the similarities and differences of educational philosophies among the universities along the OBOR route. Methods of NLP used in this article included text mining, cluster analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. The social network analysis (SNA) model was used to further analyze the interconnection and exchange of educational philosophies expressed through university mottos. Based on the five identified topic categories, we concluded that countries along the OBOR route have the same basic educational philosophy for higher education but have different emphases due to cultural differences, such as the different emphases on virtue education, collectivism, and individualism. Education for sustainability is another focus of higher education philosophy reflected by the topic categories of university mottos, which is consistent with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, for example, quality education. In addition to demonstrating the BRI impact on educational philosophies of countries along the OBOR route, this present investigation could also contribute to the growing body of knowledge about international cooperation and communication of higher education under the framework of BRI, for a globalized, shared and sustainable education in the post-COVID era

Collectivism · Economic growth · Economics · Education for sustainable development · Higher education · Individualism · Pedagogy · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Sustainability · Sustainable development · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Law · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining · Social Media and Politics

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