An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change
Aida Ramezani, Zining Zhu, Frank Rudzicz, Yang Xu
Abstract
Morality plays an important role in social well-being, but people’s moral perception is not stable and changes over time. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that text is an effective medium for informing moral change, but no attempt has been made to quantify the origins of these changes. We present a novel unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change toward entities through time. We characterize moral change with probabilistic topical distributions and infer the source text that exerts prominent influence on the moral time course. We evaluate our framework on a diverse set of data ranging from social media to news articles. We show that our framework not only captures fine-grained human moral judgments, but also identifies coherent source topics of moral change triggered by historical events. We apply our methodology to analyze the news in the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrate its utility in identifying sources of moral change in high-impact and real-time social events.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ramezani-etal-2021-unsupervised-framework,
title = "An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change",
author = "Ramezani, Aida and
Zhu, Zining and
Rudzicz, Frank and
Xu, Yang",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.105/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.105",
pages = "1215--1228"
}