Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text

TitleMeasuring Moral Rhetoric in Text
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2014
AuthorsSagi, E, Dehghani, M
JournalSocial Science Computer Review
Volume32
Issue2
Pagination132-144
ISSN0894-4393
Abstract

In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and moral keywords taken from the Moral Foundation Dictionary. This measure of semantic similarity represents the loading of these concepts on the five moral dimensions identified by Moral Foundation Theory. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method using three different concepts and corpora.

URLhttp://ssc.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0894439313506837
DOI10.1177/0894439313506837
Refereed DesignationRefereed