Development of the Japanese Version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Dictionary 2015

Abstract

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.

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“…The LIWC is a de facto standard dictionary in the psychological field that is also widely used in the psychiatry field (e.g., [14,18]). Additionally, the LIWC has been translated into more than 10 languages, and in 2021, a Japanese version (J-LIWC) was also developed [33]. The J-LIWC consists of 69 categories, including unique categories in Japanese, and contains approximately 11,600 words.…”