Constructing Vec-tionaries to Extract Message Features from Texts: A Case Study of Moral Content

Abstract While researchers often study message features like moral content in text, such as party manifestos and social media posts, their quantification remains a challenge. Conventional human coding struggles with scalability and intercoder reliability. While dictionary-based methods are cost-effective and computationally efficient, they often lack contextual sensitivity and are limited by the vocabularies developed for the original applications. In this paper, we present an approach to construct “vec-tionaries” that boost validated dictionaries with word embeddings through nonlinear optimization. By harnessing semantic relationships encoded by embeddings, vec-tionaries improve the measurement of message features from text, especially those in short format, by expanding the applicability of original vocabularies to other contexts. Importantly, a vec-tionary can produce additional metrics to capture the valence and ambivalence of a message feature beyond its strength in texts. Using moral content in tweets as a case study, we illustrate the steps to construct the moral foundations vec-tionary, showcasing its ability to process texts missed by conventional dictionaries and to produce measurements better aligned with crowdsourced human assessments. Furthermore, additional metrics from the vec-tionary unveiled unique insights that facilitated predicting downstream outcomes such as message retransmission.