A societal sentiment analysis: Predicting the values and ethics of individuals by analysing social media content

Abstract

To find out how users' social media behaviour and language are related to their ethical practices, the paper investigates applying Schwartz' psycholinguistic model of societal sentiment to social media text. The analysis is based on corpora collected from user essays as well as social media (Facebook and Twitter). Several experiments were carried out on the corpora to classify the ethical values of users, incorporating Linguistic Inquiry Word Count analysis, n-grams, topic models, psycholinguistic lexica, speech-acts, and nonlinguistic information, while applying a range of machine learners (Support Vector Machines, Logistic Regression, and Random Forests) to identify the best linguistic and non-linguistic features for automatic classification of values and ethics.