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ACL Findings2024

A Survey on Modelling Morality for Text Analysis

Ines Reinig, Maria Becker, Ines Rehbein, Simone Paolo Ponzetto

Abstract

In this survey, we provide a systematic review of recent work on modelling morality in text, an area of research that has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Our survey is motivated by the importance of modelling decisions on the created resources, the models trained on these resources and the analyses that result from the models' predictions. We review work at the interface of NLP, Computational Social Science and Psychology and give an overview of the different goals and research questions addressed in the papers, their underlying theoretical backgrounds and the methods that have been applied to pursue these goals. We then identify and discuss challenges and research gaps, such as the lack of a theoretical framework underlying the operationalisation of morality in text, the low IAA reported for many human-annotated resulting resources and the lack of validation of newly proposed resources and analyses.

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. Moral Framing in Politics (MFiP): A new resource and models for moral framingInes Rehbein, Ines Reinig, Simone Paolo PonzettoEMNLP 2025
  2. Mining the uncertainty patterns of humans and models in the annotation of moral foundations and human valuesNeele Falk, Gabriella LapesaACL 2025

Builds on13

  1. Aligning AI With Shared Human ValuesDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andrew Critch et al.ICLR 2021 · 878 citations
  2. When to Make Exceptions: Exploring Language Models as Accounts of Human Moral JudgmentZhijing Jin, Sydney Levine, Fernando Gonzalez Adauto, Ojasv Kamal et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 146 citations
  3. The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue SystemsCaleb Ziems, Jane A. Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Y. Halevy et al.ACL 2022 · 127 citations
  4. Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their ConsequencesDenis Emelin, Ronan Le Bras, Jena D. Hwang, Maxwell Forbes et al.EMNLP 2021 · 83 citations
  5. Speaking Multiple Languages Affects the Moral Bias of Language ModelsKatharina Hämmerl, Björn Deiseroth, Patrick Schramowski, Jindrich Libovický et al.ACL Findings 2023 · 16 citations

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