Papers › The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus

The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus

10 Aug 2022arXiv:2208.05545archive 2025-07-28

Jackson Trager, Alireza S. Ziabari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Preni Golazizian, Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi, Ali Omrani, Zhihe Li, Brendan Kennedy, Nils Karl Reimer, Melissa Reyes, Kelsey Cheng, Mellow Wei, Christina Merrifield, Arta Khosravi, Evans Alvarez, Morteza Dehghani

Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, pro-environmental action, political engagement, and even participation in violent protests. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but in order to achieve better performances in such subjective tasks, large sets of hand-annotated training data are needed. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We use a range of methodologies to provide baseline moral-sentiment classification results for this new corpus, e.g., cross-domain classification and knowledge transfer.

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Sentiment AnalysisSentiment ClassificationTransfer Learningdomain classification

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