A Word-Scale Probabilistic Latent Variable Model for Detecting Human Values

This paper describes a probabilistic latent variable model that is designed to detect human values such as justice or freedom that a writer has sought to reflect or appeal to when participating in a public debate. The proposed model treats the words in a sentence as having been chosen based on specific values; values reflected by each sentence are then estimated by aggregating values associated with each word. The model can determine the human values for the word in light of the influence of the previous word. This design choice was motivated by syntactic structures such as noun+noun, adjective+noun, and verb+adjective. The classifier based on the model was evaluated on a test collection containing 102 manually annotated documents focusing on one contentious political issue — Net neutrality, achieving the highest reported classification effectiveness for this task. We also compared our proposed classifier with human second annotator. As a result, the proposed classifier effectiveness is statistically comparable with human annotators.