Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text

In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use Latent Semantic Analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and moral keywords taken from the Moral Foundation Dictionary. This measure of semantic similarity represents the loading of these concepts on the five moral dimensions identified by Moral Foundation Theory. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method using three different concepts and corpora.