arXiv subjects

Vjosa Preniqi

Publications and source records attributed to Vjosa Preniqi.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Automatic Detection of Moral Values in Music Lyrics

Moral values play a fundamental role in how we evaluate information, make decisions, and form judgements around important social issues. The possibility to extract morality rapidly from lyrics enables a deeper understanding of our music-listening behaviours. Building on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), we tasked a set of transformer-based language models (BERT) fine-tuned on 2,721 synthetic lyrics generated by a large language model (GPT-4) to detect moral values in 200 real music lyrics annotated by two experts.We evaluate their predictive capabilities against a series of baselines including out-of-domain (BERT fine-tuned on MFT-annotated social media texts) and zero-shot (GPT-4) classification. The proposed models yielded the best accuracy across experiments, with an average F1 weighted score of 0.8. This performance is, on average, 5% higher than out-of-domain and zero-shot models. When examining precision in binary classification, the proposed models perform on average 12% higher than the baselines.Our approach contributes to annotation-free and effective lyrics morality learning, and provides useful insights into the knowledge distillation of LLMs regarding moral expression in music, and the potential impact of these technologies on the creative industries and musical culture.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

MoralBERT: A Fine-Tuned Language Model for Capturing Moral Values in Social Discussions

Moral values play a fundamental role in how we evaluate information, make decisions, and form judgements around important social issues. Controversial topics, including vaccination, abortion, racism, and sexual orientation, often elicit opinions and attitudes that are not solely based on evidence but rather reflect moral worldviews. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) show that moral values can be gauged in human-generated textual content. Building on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), this paper introduces MoralBERT, a range of language representation models fine-tuned to capture moral sentiment in social discourse. We describe a framework for both aggregated and domain-adversarial training on multiple heterogeneous MFT human-annotated datasets sourced from Twitter (now X), Reddit, and Facebook that broaden textual content diversity in terms of social media audience interests, content presentation and style, and spreading patterns. We show that the proposed framework achieves an average F1 score that is between 11% and 32% higher than lexicon-based approaches, Word2Vec embeddings, and zero-shot classification with large language models such as GPT-4 for in-domain inference. Domain-adversarial training yields better out-of domain predictions than aggregate training while achieving comparable performance to zero-shot learning. Our approach contributes to annotation-free and effective morality learning, and provides useful insights towards a more comprehensive understanding of moral narratives in controversial social debates using NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

"More Than Words": Linking Music Preferences and Moral Values Through Lyrics

This study explores the association between music preferences and moral values by applying text analysis techniques to lyrics. Harvesting data from a Facebook-hosted application, we align psychometric scores of 1,386 users to lyrics from the top 5 songs of their preferred music artists as emerged from Facebook Page Likes. We extract a set of lyrical features related to each song's overarching narrative, moral valence, sentiment, and emotion. A machine learning framework was designed to exploit regression approaches and evaluate the predictive power of lyrical features for inferring moral values. Results suggest that lyrics from top songs of artists people like inform their morality. Virtues of hierarchy and tradition achieve higher prediction scores ($.20 \leq r \leq .30$) than values of empathy and equality ($.08 \leq r \leq .11$), while basic demographic variables only account for a small part in the models' explainability. This shows the importance of music listening behaviours, as assessed via lyrical preferences, alone in capturing moral values. We discuss the technological and musicological implications and possible future improvements.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Modelling Moral Traits with Music Listening Preferences and Demographics

Music is an essential component in our everyday lives and experiences, as it is a way that we use to express our feelings, emotions and cultures. In this study, we explore the association between music genre preferences, demographics and moral values by exploring self-reported data from an online survey administered in Canada. Participants filled in the moral foundations questionnaire, while they also provided their basic demographic information, and music preferences. Here, we predict the moral values of the participants inferring on their musical preferences employing classification and regression techniques. We also explored the predictive power of features estimated from factor analysis on the music genres, as well as the generalist/specialist (GS) score for revealing the diversity of musical choices for each user. Our results show the importance of music in predicting a person's moral values (.55-.69 AUROC); while knowledge of basic demographic features such as age and gender is enough to increase the performance (.58-.71 AUROC).

cs.CY↗