Text-based inference of moral sentiment change
Jing Yi Xie, Renato Ferreira Pinto Junior, Graeme Hirst, Yang Xu
Abstract
We present a text-based framework for investigating moral sentiment change of the public via longitudinal corpora. Our framework is based on the premise that language use can inform people’s moral perception toward right or wrong, and we build our methodology by exploring moral biases learned from diachronic word embeddings. We demonstrate how a parameter-free model supports inference of historical shifts in moral sentiment toward concepts such as slavery and democracy over centuries at three incremental levels: moral relevance, moral polarity, and fine-grained moral dimensions. We apply this methodology to visualizing moral time courses of individual concepts and analyzing the relations between psycholinguistic variables and rates of moral sentiment change at scale. Our work offers opportunities for applying natural language processing toward characterizing moral sentiment change in society.- Anthology ID:
- D19-1472
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Hong Kong, China
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
- Venues:
- EMNLP | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4654–4663
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D19-1472
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D19-1472
- Cite (ACL):
- Jing Yi Xie, Renato Ferreira Pinto Junior, Graeme Hirst, and Yang Xu. 2019. Text-based inference of moral sentiment change. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4654–4663, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Text-based inference of moral sentiment change (Xie et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/D19-1472.pdf