Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a collection of 35,108 tweets that have been curated from seven distinct domains of discourse and hand annotated by at least three trained annotators for 10 categories of moral sentiment. To facilitate investigations of annotator response dynamics, we also provide psychological and demographic metadata for each annotator. Finally, we report moral sentiment classification baselines for this corpus using a range of popular methodologies.

Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena, such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a collection of 35,108 tweets that have been curated from seven distinct domains of discourse and hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 10 categories of moral sentiment. To facilitate investigations of annotator response dynamics, we also provide psychological and demographic meta-data for each annotator. Finally, we report moral sentiment classification baselines for this corpus using a range of popular methodologies.

Understanding motivations underlying acts of hatred are essential for developing strategies to prevent such extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice (EBEPs) against marginalized groups. In this work, we investigate the motivations underlying EBEPs as a function of moral values. Specifically, we propose EBEPs may often be best understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations. As evidence, we report five studies that integrate spatial modeling and experimental methods to investigate the relationship between moral values and EBEPs. Our results, from these U.S. based studies, suggest that moral values oriented around group preservation are predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups and associated with the belief that extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-based moral values and EBEPs against outgroups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong.

The growing prominence of online hate speech is a threat to a safe and just society. This endangering phenomenon requires collaboration across the sciences in order to generate evidence-based knowledge of, and policies for, the dissemination of hatred in online spaces. To foster such collaborations, here we present the Gab Hate Corpus (GHC), consisting of 27,665 posts from the social network service gab.ai, each annotated by a minimum of three trained annotators. Annotators were trained to label posts according to a coding typology derived from a synthesis of hate speech definitions across legal, computational, psychological, and sociological research. We detail the development of the corpus, describe the resulting distributions of hate-based rhetoric, target group, and rhetorical framing labels, and establish baseline classification performance for each using standard natural language processing methods. The GHC, which is the largest theoretically-justified, annotated corpus of hate speech to date, provides opportunities for training and evaluating hate speech classifiers and for scientific inquiries into the linguistic and network components of hate speech.

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting expressions of moral values in tweets using content analysis. This is a particularly challenging problem because moral values are often only implicitly signaled in language, and tweets contain little contextual information due to length constraints. To address these obstacles, we present a novel approach to automatically acquire background knowledge from an external knowledge base to enrich input texts and thus improve moral value prediction. By combining basic text features with background knowledge, our overall context-aware framework achieves performance comparable to a single human annotator. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate background knowledge for the prediction of implicit psychological variables in the area of computational social science.

Introducing the Gab Hate Corpus: Defining and applying hate-based rhetoric to social media posts at scale. Lang Resources & Evaluation (2022).

Acts of hate have been used to silence, terrorize, and erase marginalized social groups throughout history. The rising rates of these behaviors in recent years underscores the importance of developing a better understanding of when, why, and where they occur.In this work, we present a program of research that suggests that acts of hate may often be best understood not just as responses to threat, but also as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people's moral values and perceptions of moral violations. As evidence for this claim, we present findings from five studies that rely on a combination of natural language processing, spatial modeling, and experimental methods to investigate the relationship between moral values and acts of hate toward marginalized groups. Across these studies, we find consistent evidence that moral values oriented around ingroup preservation are disproportionately evoked in hate speech, predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups, and associated with the belief that acts of hate against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-oriented moral values and hate acts against marginalized groups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong. By accounting for the role of moralization in acts of hate, this work provides a unified framework for understanding hateful behaviors and the events or dynamics that trigger them.

No abstract