LML: A Novel Lexicon for the Moral Foundation of Liberty

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new lexicon for the moral value of liberty, created through evaluation of over 3,000 annotated examples, combining multiple sources to improve understanding of liberty-related expressions across platforms.

Contribution

The work develops a comprehensive liberty lexicon by integrating multiple lexicons and annotations, enhancing the tools for moral and social stance inference.

Findings

The combined lexicon improves the representation of liberty expressions.

Liberty expressions are complex and vary across platforms.

Enriching annotations aids in better modeling of liberty-related language.

Abstract

The moral value of liberty is a central concept in our inference system when it comes to taking a stance towards controversial social issues such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change, or the right to abortion. Here, we propose a novel Liberty lexicon evaluated on more than 3,000 manually annotated data both in in- and out-of-domain scenarios. As a result of this evaluation, we produce a combined lexicon that constitutes the main outcome of this work. This final lexicon incorporates information from an ensemble of lexicons that have been generated using word embedding similarity (WE) and compositional semantics (CS). Our key contributions include enriching the liberty annotations, developing a robust liberty lexicon for broader application, and revealing the complexity of expressions related to liberty across different platforms. Through the evaluation, we show that the difficulty of the task calls for designing approaches that combine knowledge, in an effort of improving the representations of learning systems.