# An unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00608/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [Understanding the Origins of Bias in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03611/) (2018)
- [Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.3315/) (2014)
- [Acquiring Background Knowledge to Improve Moral Value Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05467/) (2017)
- [BERT has a Moral Compass: Improvements of ethical and moral values of machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05238/) (2019)
- [Text-based inference of moral sentiment change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07209/) (2020)
- [Contextualized moral inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10762/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Law Informs Code: A Legal Informatics Approach to Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13020/) (2022)
- [Values, Ethics, Morals? On the Use of Moral Concepts in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13915/) (2023)
- [EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01715/) (2024)
- [Visual moral inference and communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11473/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Morality plays an important role in social well-being, but people's moral perception is not stable and changes over time. Recent advances in natural language processing have shown that text is an effective medium for informing moral change, but no attempt has been made to quantify the origins of these changes. We present a novel unsupervised framework for tracing textual sources of moral change toward entities through time. We characterize moral change with probabilistic topical distributions and infer the source text that exerts prominent influence on the moral time course. We evaluate our framework on a diverse set of data ranging from social media to news articles. We show that our framework not only captures fine-grained human moral judgments, but also identifies coherent source topics of moral change triggered by historical events. We apply our methodology to analyze the news in the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrate its utility in identifying sources of moral change in high-impact and real-time social events.