A Preliminary Cross-Language Investigation of Empathy in # Disability Discourse on Twitter

Existing research targeting disability on social media has looked primarily at the English language across the Global North. This has caused significant data gaps in the understanding of disability awareness and cultural mindsets elsewhere. This work presents a cross-language analysis of English and Arabic #disability tweets over a period of time. A dictionary of words was adopted to help in understanding the linguistics surrounding the term "empathy". The finding suggests that disability mentions in English tweets have slightly more negative empathetic emotions than those found in Arabic tweets. However, more investigations are needed to explore cultural variations towards empathy and disability, and how they differ linguistically in online conversations.