The Expression of Moral Values in the Twitter Debate: a Corpus of Conversations

Abstract

The present work introduces MoralConvITA, the first Italian corpus of conversations on Twitter about immigration whose annotation is focused on how moral beliefs shape users interactions.The corpus currently consists of a set of 1,724 tweets organized in adjacency pairs and annotated by referring to a pluralistic social psychology theory about moral values, i.e. the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). According to the MFT, different configurations of moral values determines the stance of individuals on sensitive topics, such as immigration, civil rights, and gender equality. Moreover, an annotation of adjacency pairs’ conversational dynamics is provided.Results of the analysis we applied on MoralConvITA shows that interesting patterns occur in the corpus, emerging from the intersection of moral studies and pragmatics that need to be generalized over larger corpora, and shedding some light on a novel promising perspective on the inter-user dynamics occurring in social media.