# MoralStrength: Exploiting a Moral Lexicon and Embedding Similarity for Moral Foundations Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08314/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [MoralBERT: A Fine-Tuned Language Model for Capturing Moral Values in Social Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07678/) (2024)
- [The Moral Debater: A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14563/) (2022)
- [The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05545/) (2022)
- [Values, Ethics, Morals? On the Use of Moral Concepts in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13915/) (2023)
- [Learning to Adapt Domain Shifts of Moral Values via Instance Weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07603/) (2022)
- [Building Knowledge-Guided Lexica to Model Cultural Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11622/) (2024)
- [Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02135/) (2024)
- [Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17228/) (2024)
- [Value Preferences Estimation and Disambiguation in Hybrid Participatory Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16751/) (2024)
- [LibertyMFD: A Lexicon to Assess the Moral Foundation of Liberty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06750/) (2022)
- [From Stance to Concern: Adaptation of Propositional Analysis to New Tasks and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10659/) (2022)
- [Do Large GPT Models Discover Moral Dimensions in Language Representations? A Topological Study Of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09397/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Moral Foundation Theory and Pre-Trained Language Models: Current Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13521/) (2024)
- [Will Annotators Disagree? Identifying Subjectivity in Value-Laden Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06704/) (2025)
- [Do Schwartz Higher-Order Values Help Sentence-Level Human Value Detection? A Study of Hierarchical Gating and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00913/) (2026)
- ["More Than Words": Linking Music Preferences and Moral Values Through Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01169/) (2022)
- [E2MoCase: A Dataset for Emotional, Event and Moral Observations in News Articles on High-impact Legal Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09001/) (2024)
- [Depression detection in social media posts using affective and social norm features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14279/) (2023)
- [Beyond English: Evaluating Automated Measurement of Moral Foundations in Non-English Discourse with a Chinese Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02451/) (2025)
- [That is Unacceptable: the Moral Foundations of Canceling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05720/) (2025)
- [News is More than a Collection of Facts: Moral Frame Preserving News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00657/) (2025)
- [Modeling Political Discourse with Sentence-BERT and BERTopic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22904/) (2025)
- [Moral Semantics Survive Machine Translation: Cross-Lingual Evidence from Moral Foundations Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22660/) (2026)
- [Morality-based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison between English and Japanese Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10643/) (2021)
- [Measuring a Texts Fairness Dimensions Using Machine Learning Based on Social Psychological Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00086/) (2021)
- [LML: A Novel Lexicon for the Moral Foundation of Liberty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11862/) (2024)
- [Generic Embedding-Based Lexicons for Transparent and Reproducible Text Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00964/) (2024)
- [Taking a SEAT: Predicting Value Interpretations from Sentiment, Emotion, Argument, and Topic Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01976/) (2025)
- [Learning the Value Systems of Societies with Preference-based Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08835/) (2026)
- [Learning Moral Diversity: Modelling Individual Perspectives in Moral Classification of Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22771/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Moral rhetoric plays a fundamental role in how we perceive and interpret the information we receive, greatly influencing our decision-making process. Especially when it comes to controversial social and political issues, our opinions and attitudes are hardly ever based on evidence alone. The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) was developed to operationalize moral values in the text. In this study, we present MoralStrength, a lexicon of approximately 1,000 lemmas, obtained as an extension of the Moral Foundations Dictionary, based on WordNet synsets. Moreover, for each lemma it provides with a crowdsourced numeric assessment of Moral Valence, indicating the strength with which a lemma is expressing the specific value. We evaluated the predictive potentials of this moral lexicon, defining three utilization approaches of increased complexity, ranging from lemmas' statistical properties to a deep learning approach of word embeddings based on semantic similarity. Logistic regression models trained on the features extracted from MoralStrength, significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art, reaching an F1-score of 87.6% over the previous 62.4% (p-value<0.01), and an average F1-Score of 86.25% over six different datasets. Such findings pave the way for further research, allowing for an in-depth understanding of moral narratives in text for a wide range of social issues.