C-MFD 2.0: Developing a Chinese Moral Foundation Dictionary

Abstract

Our paper describes the development of a Chinese Moral Foundation Dictionary (C-MFD 2.0) to assist in the automated detection and analysis of moral intuition in the Chinese context. We took the approach of method- theory co-development and followed a human-led and machine-assisted procedure that emphasized opportunities for theoretical advancement, which enhances the validity of the computational tool. Starting from the existing Chinese translation of the established English moral foundation dictionaries, we enriched the dictionary with a list of unique Chinese moral-relevant words. Five experts went through four rounds of coding, followed by the validation of 202 crowd coders. The C-MFD 2.0 identifies not only the classic five moral foundations but also proposes several potential moral foundation candidates in the Chinese context. It demonstrates acceptable validity in detecting moral foundation values from Chinese texts. Our paper illustrates how a non-English moral foundation dictionary can be built for computational analysis and furthers moral foundation theory in a cross-language context.