This paper introduces The Morality Machine, a system that tracks ethical sentiment in Twitter discussions. Empirical approaches to ethics are rare, and to our knowledge this system is the first to take a machine learning approach. It is based on Moral Foundations Theory, a framework of moral values that are assumed to be universal. Carefully handcrafted keyword dictionaries for Moral Foundations Theory exist, but experiments demonstrate that models that do not leverage these have similar or superior performance, thus proving the value of a more pure machine learning approach.

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doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46349-0_3, hdl.handle.net/1765/96230
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Department of Psychology

Teernstra, L., van der Putten, P., Noordegraaf-Eelens, L., & Verbeek, F. (2016). The morality machine: Tracking moral values in Tweets. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-46349-0_3