Foundations Dictionary Research Articles

MoralStrength: Exploiting a moral lexicon and embedding similarity for moral foundations prediction

Moral rhetoric plays a fundamental role in how we perceive and interpret the information we receive, greatly influencing our decision-making process. Especially when it comes to controversial social and political issues, our opinions and attitudes are hardly ever based on evidence alone. The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) was developed to operationalize moral values in the text. In this study, we present MoralStrength, a lexicon of approximately 1,000 lemmas, obtained as an extension of the Moral Foundations Dictionary, based on WordNet synsets. Moreover, for each lemma it provides with a crowdsourced numeric assessment of Moral Valence, indicating the strength with which a lemma is expressing the specific value. We evaluated the predictive potentials of this moral lexicon, defining three utilization approaches of increased complexity, ranging from lemmas’ statistical properties to a deep learning approach of word embeddings based on semantic similarity. Logistic regression models trained on the features extracted from MoralStrength, significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art, reaching an F1-score of 87.6% over the previous 62.4% (p-value <0.01), and an average F1-Score of 86.25% over six different datasets. Such findings pave the way for further research, allowing for an in-depth understanding of moral narratives in text for a wide range of social issues.

Do changes in threat salience predict the moral content of sermons? The case of Friday Khutbas in Turkey

AbstractWe analyzed the content of “Friday Khutbas” delivered in Turkish mosques between January 2001 and December 2018 to test the prediction of moral foundations theory (MFT) literature that threat salience would lead to an increased endorsement of binding moral foundations. As societal‐level indicators of threat, we examined (a) historical data on the proportion of terrorism‐related news published in a Turkish newspaper, (b) the geopolitical risk score of Turkey as measured by Geopolitical Risk Index, and (c) Google Trends data on the search frequency of words “terror”, “terrorism”, or “terrorist”. To measure the endorsement of moral foundations, we built a Turkish Moral Foundations Dictionary and counted the relative frequency of morality‐related words in the khutbas delivered in Istanbul, Turkey. Time series analyses showed that risk salience in a certain month was positively related to endorsement of the loyalty/betrayal foundation in that month’s Friday Khutbas. There were mixed results for the other moral foundations.

Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites

Moral foundations theory (MFT) suggests that individuals on the political left draw upon moral intuitions relating primarily to care and fairness, whereas conservatives are more motivated than liberals by authority, ingroup, and purity concerns. The theory of conservatism as motivated social cognition (CMSC) suggests that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to threat and to negative stimuli. Because evidence for both accounts rests on studies of mass publics, however, it remains unclear whether political elites of the left and right exhibit these inclinations. Thus, this analysis uses the 2015-16 United States presidential primary season as an occasion to explore partisan differences in candidates’ moral rhetoric. The analysis focuses on verbal responses to questions posed during party primary debates, a setting that is largely unscripted and thus potentially subject to intuitive influences. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is employed to analyze how frequently candidates used words representing various moral foundations, distinguishing between positive and negative references to each. Consistent with CMSC, the Republican candidates were more likely to use negative-valence moral terminology, describing violations of moral foundations. The direction of some partisan differences contradicts the expectations of MFT. Donald Trump, a novice candidate, was an exception to the typical Republican pattern, making markedly lower overall use of moral-foundations vocabulary.

Development and validation of the Japanese Moral Foundations Dictionary.

The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) is a useful tool for applying the conceptual framework developed in Moral Foundations Theory and quantifying the moral meanings implicated in the linguistic information people convey. However, the applicability of the MFD is limited because it is available only in English. Translated versions of the MFD are therefore needed to study morality across various cultures, including non-Western cultures. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. We developed the first Japanese version of the MFD (referred to as the J-MFD) using a semi-automated method—this serves as a reference when translating the MFD into other languages. We next tested the validity of the J-MFD by analyzing open-ended written texts about the situations that Japanese participants thought followed and violated the five moral foundations. We found that the J-MFD correctly categorized the Japanese participants’ descriptions into the corresponding moral foundations, and that the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) scores correlated with the frequency of situations, of total words, and of J-MFD words in the participants’ descriptions for the Harm and Fairness foundations. The J-MFD can be used to study morality unique to the Japanese and also multicultural comparisons in moral behavior.

The Development of Japanese version of Moral Foundation Dictionary

The Development of Japanese version of Moral Foundation Dictionary

Continuity and Change in the (New) Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary

Abstract The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary (KFD)1, the only bilingual dictionary between Polish and American English, first came out in 1959 (English-Polish volume) and 1961 (Polish-English volume). Between then and 1995, it was reprinted fourteen times, with the content completely intact. In 2003, The New Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary (NKFD1) finally appeared, in two printed volumes accompanied by a CD. Originally intended as a straightforward update of KFD, it ended up being closer to a brand new dictionary, linked with its predecessor mainly through the title - a consequence of the continuing patronage of The Kosciuszko Foundation - and through its focus on American English. With around 133,000 main entries, it was, at the time of publication, the most comprehensive English-Polish, Polish-English dictionary in existence. A new, revised and enlarged edition (NKFD2) is about to be published soon, this time exclusively in digital form. Having been involved in the latter two projects - respectively, as editor of the English-Polish volume and editor-in-chief - the author examines the development of the dictionary, tracing the continuity and change in its three successive incarnations.

Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text

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.

The Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary, English-Polish Polish-English. Vol. I. English-Polish

The Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary, English-Polish Polish-English. Vol. I. English-Polish

The Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary. Vol. I: English-Polish.

The Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary. Vol. I: English-Polish.

The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary. I

The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary. I

The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary, Vol. I: English-Polish

The Kościuszko Foundation Dictionary, Vol. I: English-Polish