In this paper, we propose an unsupervised framework that infers the source text with prominent influence on the moral time course.
Abstract
Morality plays a critical 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 (e.g., Donald Trump) 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 rigorously 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.
Presentation
Following is Aida’s slide deck presented at EMNLP 2021.