Abstract
The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Dictionary 2015 (LIWC2015) is a standard text analysis dictionary that quantifies the linguistic and psychometric properties of English words. A Japanese version of the LIWC2015 dictionary (J-LIWC2015) has been expected in the fields of natural language processing and cross-cultural research. This study aims to create the J-LIWC2015 through systematic investigations of the original dictionary and Japanese corpora. The entire LIWC2015 dictionary was initially subjected to human and machine translation into Japanese. After verifying the frequency of use of the words in large corpora, frequent words and phrases that are unique to Japanese were added to the dictionary, followed by recategorization by psychologists. The updated dictionary indicated good internal consistency, semantic equivalence with the original LIWC2015 dictionary, and good construct validity in each category. The evidence suggests that the J-LIWC2015 dictionary is a powerful research tool in computational social science to scrutinize the psychological processes behind Japanese texts and promote standardized cross-cultural investigations in combination with LIWC dictionaries in different languages.
Highlights
Understanding how people feel and think in their daily lives is a primary objective of social science
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) can be used for simple sentiment analysis to study affective states such as positive and negative, it is not just a sentiment dictionary but rather a general research tool for inferring more complicated psychological states from texts
The current study reports the result of essay content analysis based on J-LIWC2015, which is not included in Igarashi (2019, Sample 2). 23https://www.lancers.jp 24Sensitivity power analysis in G∗Power3 (Faul et al, 2007) for one-way ANOVA shows that the effect size (f ) of the current
Summary
Understanding how people feel and think in their daily lives is a primary objective of social science. Social scientists have found the systematic quantitative analysis of text-based data challenging because of its complexity, recent advancements in computational linguistics have made it possible to evaluate the psychological meanings of language use. The software classifies each word in a given text into multiple linguistic/psychological categories based on the words included in the dictionary file (hereafter referred to as “target words”) and calculates the proportion of the words in each category to the total number of words in the entire text. The dictionary file defines target words as a collection of frequently used words, each of which is linked to specific categories, J-LIWC2015 such as positive/negative emotions, cognitive and perceptual processes, and personal and social concerns. LIWC can be used for simple sentiment analysis to study affective states such as positive and negative, it is not just a sentiment dictionary but rather a general research tool for inferring more complicated psychological states from texts
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