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
Bibkey:
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)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1472.pdf
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