The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) is a list of English words related to each of five moral foundations (i.e., harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity) and morality in general; it is used to measure morality in written texts. In order to analyze Japanese texts in the same framework of the Moral Foundations Theory, we developed the Japanese version of the MFD (J-MFD) based on the original version by using two online linguistic resources and two corpora and with the aid of computational methods. The methodological details are described in the following paper.
The J-MFD ("J-MFD_2018.dic") and a word-segmentation program ("word_segmentation.py") used to segment Japanese sentences into words are publicly available under the MIT License. If you find problems, please let us know by accessing the "issues" function on this page. We will use that information for future updates.
Please cite the following paper when you use the J-MFD in your published works.
- A. Matsuo, K. Sasahara, Y. Taguchi, and M. Karasawa, Development and Validation of the Japanese Moral Foundations Dictionary, PLoS ONE 14(3): e0213343 (2019).
This research was supported in part by JSPS/MEXT KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP15H03446 and JP17H06383 in #4903, JST PRESTO Grant Number JPMJPR16D6, and JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR17A4.