The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and validation of the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic tool designed to analyze language in threat assessment related to grievance-fueled violence, with promising initial classification results.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new psycholinguistic dictionary specifically designed for threat assessment, developed with practitioner input and validated on violent and non-violent texts.

Findings

Dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2,318 participants

Strong evidence of differences between violent and non-violent texts in several categories

Promising classification performance with room for improvement

Abstract

This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary which can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fuelled violence threat assessment. We describe the development the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2,318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evidence for a difference between populations in several dictionary categories. Further classification tasks showed promising performance, but future improvements are still needed. Finally, we provide instructions and suggestions for the use of the Grievance Dictionary by security professionals and (violence) researchers.