# Polarization and Morality: Lexical Analysis of Abortion Discourse on Reddit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00455/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Reddit After Roe: A Computational Analysis of Abortion Narratives and Barriers in the Wake of Dobbs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22566/) (2026)
- [TWeddit : A Dataset of Triggering Stories Predominantly Shared by Women on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11819/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study investigates whether division on political topics is mapped with the distinctive patterns of language use. We collect a total 145,832 Reddit comments on the abortion debate and explore the languages of subreddit communities r/prolife and r/prochoice. With consideration of the Moral Foundations Theory, we examine lexical patterns in three ways. First, we compute proportional frequencies of lexical items from the Moral Foundations Dictionary in order to make inferences about each group's moral considerations when forming arguments for and against abortion. We then create n-gram models to reveal frequent collocations from each stance group and better understand how commonly used words are patterned in their linguistic context and in relation to morality values. Finally, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify underlying topical structures in the corpus data. Results show that the use of morality words is mapped with the stances on abortion.