ME2-BERT: Are Events and Emotions what you need for Moral Foundation Prediction?

Lorenzo Zangari, Candida M. Greco, Davide Picca, Andrea Tagarelli


Abstract
Moralities, emotions, and events are complex aspects of human cognition, which are often treated separately since capturing their combined effects is challenging, especially due to the lack of annotated data. Leveraging their interrelations hence becomes crucial for advancing the understanding of human moral behaviors. In this work, we propose ME2-BERT, the first holistic framework for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model like BERT to the task of moral foundation prediction. ME2-BERT integrates events and emotions for learning domain-invariant morality-relevant text representations. Our extensive experiments show that ME2-BERT outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for moral foundation prediction, with an average increase up to 35% in the out-of-domain scenario.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.638
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9516–9532
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.638/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lorenzo Zangari, Candida M. Greco, Davide Picca, and Andrea Tagarelli. 2025. ME2-BERT: Are Events and Emotions what you need for Moral Foundation Prediction?. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 9516–9532, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ME2-BERT: Are Events and Emotions what you need for Moral Foundation Prediction? (Zangari et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.638.pdf