LibertyMFD: A Lexicon to Assess the Moral Foundation of Liberty

Abstract

Quantifying the moral narratives expressed in the user-generated text, news, or public discourses is fundamental for understanding individuals' concerns and viewpoints and preventing violent protests and social polarisation. The Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) was developed to operationalise morality in a five-dimensional scale system. Recent developments of the theory urged for the introduction of a new foundation, the Liberty Foundation. Being only recently added to the theory, there are no available linguistic resources to assess whether liberty is present in text corpora. Given its importance to current social issues such as the vaccination debate, we propose two data-driven approaches, deriving two candidate lexicons generated based on aligned documents from online news sources with different worldviews. After extensive experimentation, we contribute to the research community a novel lexicon that assesses the liberty moral foundation in the way individuals with contrasting viewpoints express themselves through written text. The LibertyMFD dictionary can be a valuable tool for policymakers to understand diverse viewpoints on controversial social issues such as vaccination, abortion, or even uprisings, as they happen and on a large scale.

GoodIT '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good. GoodIT'22, September 7-9, 2022, Limassol, Cyprus

References in corpus (5)

• Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents
• Measuring Praise and Criticism: Inference of Semantic Orientation from Association
• Generalized Word Shift Graphs: A Method for Visualizing and Explaining Pairwise Comparisons Between Texts
• Human Values and Attitudes towards Vaccination in Social Media
• Political Partisanship and Anti-Science Attitudes in Online Discussions about Covid-19

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A Survey on Moral Foundation Theory and Pre-Trained Language Models: Current Advances and Challenges
• MoralBERT: A Fine-Tuned Language Model for Capturing Moral Values in Social Discussions
• Moral Narratives Around the Vaccination Debate on Facebook
• Constructing Vec-tionaries to Extract Message Features from Texts: A Case Study of Moral Appeals