Computational Communication Research - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2023

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Our paper describes the development of a Chinese Moral Foundation Dictionary (C- MFD 2.0) to assist the automated detection and analysis of moral intuition in the Chinese context. Taking the approach of method-theory co-development, we follow a human-led and machine-assisted procedure that emphasizes opportunities for theoretical advancement, which enhances the validity of the computational tool. Starting fr Read More

A reliable multilingual news framing analysis can shed light on the similarities and dissimilarities of journalistic practices across geographical areas and cultures, facilitating comparative studies in media discourse and framing analysis. However, there is an insufficient supply of standardizing and validating computational approaches for multilingual text analysis. To fill the gap, this study validates a multi-stage mixed-method appro Read More

Text-as-data methods have revolutionized the study of political behavior and communication, and the increasing availability of multilingual text collections promises exciting new applications of these methods in comparative research. To encourage researchers to seize these opportunities, we provide a guide to multilingual quantitative text analysis. Responding to the unique challenges research faces in multilingual analysis, Read More

Multilingual text analysis is increasingly important to address the current narrow focus of English and other Indo-European languages in comparative studies. However, there has been a lack of a comprehensive approach to evaluate the validity of multilingual text analytic methods across different language contexts. To address this issue, we propose that the validity of multilingual text analysis should be studied thro Read More

Comparative scholars studying political news content at scale face the challenge of addressing multiple languages. While many train individual supervised machine learning classifiers for each language, this is a costly and time-consuming process. We propose that instead of relying on thematic labels generated by manual coding, researchers can use ‘distant’ labels created by cues in article URLs. Sections reflected in U Read More

Comparative research in communication often involves selecting and analyzing documents in multiple languages. Machine translation is an effective pre-processing step for automated content analysis, however its impact on data collection remains under-examined. Using a parallel language corpus of European Parliament debates, this paper evaluates machine translation as an approach for multilingual document r Read More

While large language models have revolutionised computational text analysis methods, the field is still tilted towards English language resources. Even as there are pre-trained models for some smaller languages, the coverage is far from universal, and pre-training large language models is an expensive and complicated task. This uneven language coverage limits comparative social research in terms of its geographical and ling Read More

The social science toolkit for computational text analysis is still very much in the making. We know surprisingly little about how to produce valid insights from large amounts of multilingual texts for comparative social science research. In this paper, we test several recent innovations from deep transfer learning to help advance the computational toolkit for social science research in multilingual settings. We investigate the e Read More

The quality of automated machine translation is rapidly approaching that of professional human translation. However, the best methods remain costly in terms of money, computational resources, and/or time, particularly when applied to large volumes of text. In contrast, word-level translation is both free and fast, simply mapping each word in a source language deterministically to a target language. This paper dem Read More

For researchers interested in political communication and electoral politics, the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is a widely-used database, which contains an extensive repository of annotated electoral manifestos. However, by relying on the fact that country-specific expert coders assign text excerpts to different policy areas, researchers frequently fail to engage with the multilingual nature of the corpus. This articl Read More