LibertyMFD: A Lexicon to Assess the Moral Foundation of Liberty

TL;DR

This paper introduces LibertyMFD, a new lexicon designed to measure the expression of the Liberty moral foundation in text, aiding understanding of diverse viewpoints on social issues.

Contribution

It presents the first linguistic resource specifically for assessing the Liberty moral foundation in text, developed through data-driven approaches with online news sources.

Findings

The lexicon effectively captures liberty expressions across contrasting viewpoints.

It enables large-scale analysis of moral narratives in social discourse.

The tool can inform policymakers on public opinions on controversial issues.

Abstract

Quantifying the moral narratives expressed in the user-generated text, news, or public discourses is fundamental for understanding individuals' concerns and viewpoints and preventing violent protests and social polarisation. The Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) was developed to operationalise morality in a five-dimensional scale system. Recent developments of the theory urged for the introduction of a new foundation, the Liberty Foundation. Being only recently added to the theory, there are no available linguistic resources to assess whether liberty is present in text corpora. Given its importance to current social issues such as the vaccination debate, we propose two data-driven approaches, deriving two candidate lexicons generated based on aligned documents from online news sources with different worldviews. After extensive experimentation, we contribute to the research community a novel lexicon that assesses the liberty moral foundation in the way individuals with contrasting viewpoints express themselves through written text. The LibertyMFD dictionary can be a valuable tool for policymakers to understand diverse viewpoints on controversial social issues such as vaccination, abortion, or even uprisings, as they happen and on a large scale.