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.
Languages have diverse characteristics that have emerged through evolution. In modern English grammar, the perfect is formed with have+PP (past participle), but in earlier English, the be+PP form also existed. It is widely recognised that the auxiliary verb BE was replaced by HAVE throughout evolution, except for some special cases. However, whether this evolution was caused by natural selection or random drift is still unclear. Here we examined directional forces in the evolution of the English perfect with intransitive by combining three large-scale data sources: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and Google Books. We found that most intransitive verbs exhibited an apparent transition from be+PP to have+PP, most of which were classified as ‘selection’ by a deep neural network-based model. These results suggest that the English perfect could have evolved through natural selection rather than random drift, and provide insights into the cultural evolution of grammar.
The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Dictionary 2015 (LIWC2015) is a standard text analysis dictionary that quantifies linguistic/psychometric properties of English words. The development of 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 J-LIWC2015 through systematic investigations of the original dictionary and Japanese corpora. All words in the LIWC2015 dictionary were 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 re-category assignments 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 psychological processes behind Japanese texts and to promote standardized cross-cultural investigations in combination with the LIWC dictionaries in different languages.
Languages have diverse characteristics that have emerged through evolution. In modern English grammar, the perfect is formed with have+PP (past participle), but in older English the be+PP form existed as well. It is widely recognised that the auxiliary verb BE was replaced by HAVE throughout evolution, except in several exceptional cases. However, prior studies have not clarified the evolutionary factors behind this phenomenon. In this study, we combined three large-scale corpora of English (Early English Books Online, Corpora of Historical American English, and Google Books) and analysed them to illuminate the factors that drove the evolution of the perfect in English. Our results provide important insights into the evolution of grammar. We found that most intransitive verbs exhibited an increase in the frequency of have+PP, some of which passed the Frequency Increment Test (FIT), indicating a rapid S-shape increase. This finding strongly suggests that the perfect could have evolved through natural selection rather than random drift.
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