Developing simplified Chinese psychological linguistic analysis dictionary for microblog

Abstract

The words that people use could reveal their emotional states, intentions, thinking styles, individual differences, etc. LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) has been widely used for psychological text analysis, and its dictionary is the core. The Traditional Chinese version of LIWC dictionary has been released, which is a translation of LIWC English dictionary. However, Simplified Chinese which is the world's most widely used language has subtle differences with Traditional Chinese. Furthermore, both English LIWC dictionary and Traditional Chinese version dictionary were both developed for relatively formal text. Microblog has become more and more popular in China nowadays. Original LIWC dictionaries take less consideration on microblog popular words, which makes it less applicable for text analysis on microblog. In this study, a Simplified Chinese LIWC dictionary is established according to LIWC categories. After translating Traditional Chinese dictionary into Simplified Chinese, five thousand words most frequently used in microblog are added into the dictionary. Four graduate students of psychology rated whether each word belonged in a category. The reliability and validity of Simplified Chinese LIWC dictionary were tested by these four judges. This new dictionary could contribute to all the text analysis on microblog in future. © Springer International Publishing 2013.