Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning

Shamik Roy, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Dan Goldwasser


Abstract
Extracting moral sentiment from text is a vital component in understanding public opinion, social movements, and policy decisions. The Moral Foundation Theory identifies five moral foundations, each associated with a positive and negative polarity. However, moral sentiment is often motivated by its targets, which can correspond to individuals or collective entities. In this paper, we introduce morality frames, a representation framework for organizing moral attitudes directed at different entities, and come up with a novel and high-quality annotated dataset of tweets written by US politicians. Then, we propose a relational learning model to predict moral attitudes towards entities and moral foundations jointly. We do qualitative and quantitative evaluations, showing that moral sentiment towards entities differs highly across political ideologies.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.783
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9939–9958
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.783
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.783
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shamik Roy, Maria Leonor Pacheco, and Dan Goldwasser. 2021. Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9939–9958, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning (Roy et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.783.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.783.mp4
Code
 shamikroy/moral-role-prediction