Enhancing the Measurement of Social Effects by Capturing Morality

Rezvaneh Rezapour, Saumil H. Shah, Jana Diesner

Abstract
We investigate the relationship between basic principles of human morality and the expression of opinions in user-generated text data. We assume that people’s backgrounds, culture, and values are associated with their perceptions and expressions of everyday topics, and that people’s language use reflects these perceptions. While personal values and social effects are abstract and complex concepts, they have practical implications and are relevant for a wide range of NLP applications. To extract human values (in this paper, morality) and measure social effects (morality and stance), we empirically evaluate the usage of a morality lexicon that we expanded via a quality controlled, human in the loop process. As a result, we enhanced the Moral Foundations Dictionary in size (from 324 to 4,636 syntactically disambiguated entries) and scope. We used both lexica for feature-based and deep learning classification (SVM, RF, and LSTM) to test their usefulness for measuring social effects. We find that the enhancement of the original lexicon led to measurable improvements in prediction accuracy for the selected NLP tasks.
Anthology ID:
W19-1305
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, USA
Editors:
Alexandra Balahur, Roman Klinger, Veronique Hoste, Carlo Strapparava, Orphee De Clercq
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
35–45
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-1305
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-1305
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rezvaneh Rezapour, Saumil H. Shah, and Jana Diesner. 2019. Enhancing the Measurement of Social Effects by Capturing Morality. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 35–45, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing the Measurement of Social Effects by Capturing Morality (Rezapour et al., WASSA 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/autopr/W19-1305.pdf
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